xpda: December 2006

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Grandma Ruth

My dad's mother was named Ruth. It makes sense that she should have come from Ruthenia, but in fact she was born in Oklahoma. Her dad came to Oklahoma from Kansas in the Oklahoma Land Run.

The Oklahoma Land Run is generally thought to have occurred in 1889. In fact, there were five Oklahoma Land Runs. The one in 1889 was first, and opened up 2 million acres of "unassigned lands" to settlement. In the fourth and largest land run (1893), Ruth's dad homesteaded in the Cherokee Strip. Actually he wasn't her dad yet because she wasn't born yet. But after Alvin got to Oklahoma, he married Pinkie and they had Ruth and 13 other kids. Actually, Osie had some of the kids, but there were 14 in all. The Cherokee Strip was a strip of land 60 miles wide and about 225 miles long bought from the Cherokee Indians for $8.5 million.

At any rate, I have it on good authority that Grandma Ruth did not come from Ruthenia. She came from the dust bowl.

   hi res

I guess the dust bowl didn't really start until a few years after Grandma Ruth came into the world. Maybe she caused it.

Ruthenium

Ruthenium did come from Ruthenia. That's where it got its name. It was discovered as an impurity in some platinum from the Ural Mountains. I think the Urals are partly inside Ruthenia, although there may be some controversy over this because the Ruthenian boundary was never clearly defined by the UN, let alone the United Federation of Planets.

Ruthenium is good for things like hard drives. If you take a thin layer of ruthenium and put it between two magnetic layers, you can get denser data on your hard drive. The thin layer is about 3 atoms thick.

      http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.200...

Ruthenium also makes a moderately unique superconductor when you add a little Strontium and Oxygen. The electrons behave differently in superconducting Sr₂RuO₄ than they do in other superconductors.

      http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Liu11-2004.html

So where do you get the Ruthenium for your new superconducting woofers? On the internet, of course!

      http://pgmchina.en.alibaba.com/offerdetail/50973380/Sel...

Offshore Oil

You can find a lot of fun things on the internet. If you've finally decided to get rid of that offshore drilling rig that's been sitting in the back yard for years, you might try internet. In addition to Ruthenium, alibaba.com has listings for "offshore drilling rigs wanted":

      http://www.alibaba.com/manufacturer/14326999/Buy_Offsho...

If you're planning to buy an offshore drilling rig for a yard ornament or for bass fishing, there are some decisions you'll need to make. Offshore drilling rigs come in submersible, jack-up, semi-submersible (floaters), fixed platforms, drilling ships, and of course, the combo model that combines drilling and production in one platform. There are lots of variations on these themes.

     http://www.naturalgas.org/naturalgas/extraction_offshore.asp

     http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/offshore/deepwatr/option...

About 60% of the world's petroleum currently comes from offshore production, according to British Columbia.

      http://www.offshoreoilandgas.gov.bc.ca/world-offshore-o...

The U.S. imports around half its oil. Between 1/4 and 1/3 of U.S. oil comes from offshore production. About 3/4 of that comes from the Gulf of Mexico. So between 10% and 15% of the oil used in the U.S. comes from the Gulf of Mexico. That is quite a lot.

      http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/production.html

      http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nu...

The Petronius platform is a fixed production platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It is built on a compliant tower. "Compliant" means the tower moves back and forth a little in the waves and the wind - about 20 feet at the top. The structure is a little over 2000 feet high, but about 1750 of that is underwater. If you count the entire 2001 feet, it's the tallest freestanding structure in the world.

The KVLY mast in North Dakota is the tallest man-made structure in the world. It's 2063 feet high. It has guy wires, so it's not considered "free-standing."

      http://www.kvlytv11.com/info/info_tower.html

      http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.342116,-97.28901&spn=...

The Petronius platform took quite a bit of damage from Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Ivan was a category five hurricane when its eye passed almost directory over the Petronius platform. During the hurricane, a weather buoy measured 52-foot significant waves. That means that 1/3 of the waves were higher than 52 feet.

      http://www.weather.gov/pa/fstories/2004/1004/fs13oct200...

The platform had been evacuated before the hurricane hit, and I assume the oil was turned off.

     http://www.oilonline.com/news/features/oe/20050805.3D_l...

      http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13459774/

When Petronius was being built in 1998, they added the "topsides." Those are the huge assemblies that go on top of the rig with things like living quarters, machinery, and a whole lot of et cetera. There were two topside modules, one weighing 4,000 tons and the other 3,600 tons. That's 8 or 9 million pounds each.

When they were adding the topside modules, a 2.25" cable broke. The $70 million 3,600 ton topside got away from them ended up at the bottom of the ocean. I bet that got some heart rates up.

      http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/petronius/

The Typhoon oil platform was planted on tensioned legs in 2100 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2005, Hurricane Rita came. The Typhoon platform was found floating about 70 miles away, upside down. It was totaled.

      http://www.rigzone.com/news/image_detail.asp?img_id=2579

      http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/05/3374321.html

Hurricane Ivan destroyed seven platforms in 2004 and damaged 26 others. Katrina destroyed at least 46 platforms in 2005

The jack-up rig Ocean Warwick had its legs damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. When Hurricane Katrina came by in 2005 it blew the Ocean Warwick 66 miles up to the beach on Dauphin Island, Alabama.

      http://www.rigzone.com/news/image_detail.asp?img_id=2483

Deepwater Oil

In 1997, Shell's Mensa platform set a world's record for production in 5,300 feet of water.

     http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/mensa/index...

Now the record is 8,960 feet. Exploratory wells have been drilled in water more than 10,000 feet deep.

     http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=39035

Here are the deepwater wells recently drilled and completed:

     http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/Current_Deepwater_Acti...

The Jack Ryan drill ship is operating off Angola. It is capable of drilling in 10,000 feet of water.

hi res...

hi res...

http://www.globalsantafe.com/fleet/rigfacts/JackRyan.pdf

Thunder Horse

BP's Thunder Horse platform is really big. I think it's the biggest in the world. It cost around a billion dollars. It was designed to handle 147 mph winds and 100-foot waves. The platform has accommodations for 229 people. They used to call Thunder Horse Crazy Horse but some Sioux Indians considered Crazy Horse an insult to their proud heritage.

The Thunder Horse platform is located at about 88 29.65W, 28 11.4N. That's 60 miles or so southeast of Louisiana. The Thunder Horse field was the largest oil and gas field discovered in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2001. I don't know if it's still the biggest.

This picture was taken before the rig was towed to its deepwater home.

     http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/crazy_horse/

This is a good BP article on the Thunder Horse platform.

     http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=9013609&...

Here's a good article on the development of the Thunder Horse Field.

      http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=9013613&...

The Secretary of the Interior seems to like offshore drilling.

     http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-05p.html

Dockwise Transports

The Thunder Horse Platform was built by Daewoo Shipbuilding in South Korea. South Korea is not very close to the Gulf of Mexico. So Dockwise Shipping was hired to ship the platform to Ingleside, Texas, near Corpus Christi. They expanded their largest ship, and 61 days after they loaded the platform, it was in Texas. They went via the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa. They traveled almost 16,000 miles at an average of 11 knots. That is really amazing to me.

The platform weighed 59,500 tons, was 373 feet wide (overhanging 83 feet on each side of the ship) and was 433 feet tall.

      http://www.dockwise.com/index.php?sid=25&project=81

     http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/ThunderHorse.pdf

The Dockwise ships are semi-submersible. They sink enough to load floating cargo, then pump out their seawater ballast to lift the cargo out of the water. They ship things like sailboats, floating hotels, and decommissioned nuclear subs.

It doesn't always go flawlessly. A few days ago the Dockwise ship Might Servant 3 sank off the Angolan coast.

The 21 ship's crew and the 83 drilling platform crew are all OK. The drilling platform was not damaged. I think the ship might be a bit waterlogged, however.

      http://www.dockwise.com/?sid=33&press=82
      http://www.dockwise.com/?sid=33&press=84
      http://www.dockwise.com/index.php?sid=15

Hurricane Dennis

In July 2005, the Thunder Horse platform was evacuated before Hurricane Dennis arrived. This is normal procedure on an offshore platform. When the people came back, they noticed that Thunder Horse was sitting at an angle of 20 degrees.

      http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=11305

Consistent with AP's photo accuracy, they ran a photo of a platform sinking in 2001, claiming it was Thunder Horse. It looked a lot worse.

      http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=11372

It turned out that the list of the Thunder Horse was caused by a malfunctioning ballast system instead of major hurricane damage. They got that fixed before the next hurricane came around. Since then Thunder Horse has weathered Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without major problems such as sinking or floating away.

     http://www.offshore-technology.com/features/feature582/

The latest "challenge" in the Thunder Horse platform is with the submerged equipment. Earlier this year they were pumping water through the system to test it out. Some welding failed. So they're going to bring up all the subsea components and replace them. That will delay Thunder Horse production until 2008.

      http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&...

Discoverer Enterprise

Here is a Google Earth model of the Thunder Horse and the drill ship Discoverer Enterprise.

      http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/379055-odp.zip

The Discoverer Enterprise is a big drill ship owned by Transocean. It is rated for operating conditions of 80 knot winds and 40-foot waves, and storm conditions of 100 knot winds and 50 foot waves. The Discoverer Enterprise drilled the exploration wells for the Thunder Horse Field.

      http://www.deepwater.com/DiscovererEnterprise.cfm

      http://www.deepwater.com/fleetspecifications.cfm?ID=574

Sometimes things go wrong. In May 2003, the Discoverer Enterprise was pulling out of a well hole in 2-3 foot seas. It experienced some unexpected wave action, the ship moved, and the drilling riser broke in two places.

When you drill an oil well on land, you pump liquid down the pipe that holds the drill bit. This fluid keeps the drill bit cool and lubricated. The fluid then comes back up out the outside of the drill stem, all the way to the surface. It transports ground up rock, sand, gravel, and whatever else used to be where the hole is, back up to the surface. The fluid is called drilling mud.

In offshore drilling, the same thing is done. But there is a big pipe outside the drill stem between the ocean floor and the surface, to direct the drilling mud up to the surface. This big pipe that encloses the drill stem is called the riser.

When the riser under the Discoverer Enterprise broke, it spilled about 2450 barrels of drilling mud. When something like this happens (in the U.S., Canada, or Europe anyway), there is a lot of work to be done. They have to figure out what caused the accident, how to prevent it from happening in the future, what was spilled, how much of it was spilled, where it went, and how it affects the ocean life.

Here's the report on this accident. I was impressed with the detail they go into.

     http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/2004-039.pdf

They use an underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to video the damage.

Mud plume escaping from the parted riser:

Dispersion of the drilling mud:

Riser string resting on the seafloor. "The lack of accumulated solids indicates that the current dispersed the released drill fluids."

Lower marine riser package after the release. "Note the lack of accumulated drilling fluid solids."

U-166

They also use underwater vehicles to survey the ocean floor before they construct a pipeline. Towed sonar modules have traditionally been used, but ROVs and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are also used. The AUVs used are usually not really autonomous, they just operate without a tether. Here is the Hugins 3000 AUV operated by C&C Technologies. It has a lot of state-of-the-art sonar, and operates at 4 knots down to 10,000 feet.

In 2001, C&C Technologies was surveying for the Okeanos pipeline between Thunder Horse and Mississippi, they encountered something unusual -- a World War II submarine in 4780 feet of water.

After some further investigation, they confirmed that it was the German U-boat U-166. It's located in the neighborhood of 88 12W, 28 48N. But according to history, that's the wrong place. U-166 was supposed to be 130 miles to the west. Rather than moving the 60-year-old wreck, they decided to correct history. They also re-routed the pipeline around the wreck of U-166.

In 1942, U-166 torpedoed and sank the passenger ship USS Robert E Lee. Afterward, the Navy patrol boat escorting the Robert E Lee dropped some depth charges and reported an oil slick. They assumed the U-boat was only damaged. A few days later, an airplane reported sinking the U-boat 130 miles to the west. The plane was credited with sinking U-166. Now it is generally accepted that the Navy patrol boat PC-566 really sank U-166 on the day it torpedoed the Robert E Lee, although some maintain it was an alien starship that sank the submarine.

     http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/U166_OE_Paper.pdf

Here are some underwater photos of U-166. Some of these include modern instrumentation planted there for research.

      http://www.dbi.ca/Ocean/U166/index.html

More on U-166 and the Robert E Lee:

      http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/aug02/feature_oil.html

      http://www.pastfoundation.org/U166/U-166.htm

      http://www.pastfoundation.org/U166/RobertELee.htm

Ocean Census

In addition to undersea pipeline surveys and shipwreck investigations, they use AUVs and ROVs to research marine life.

      http://www.coml.org/edu/tech/reach/auv1.htm

      http://www.coml.org/edu/tech/reach/rov1.htm

They also use manned submersibles. Here's a Russian MIR submersible taking the first humans to visit the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone at 3000 meters in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (2003).

This is a journal entry of some people taking the Alvin submersible down over 2000 meters in the Pacific.

      http://www.mbari.org/expeditions/eastermicroplate/March...

They are part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, founded in 1987 by David Packard. David Packard also co-founded Hewlett-Packard.

On this dive, they were working for the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year project to catalog as much ocean life as can be cataloged. The Census is in its sixth year now, with some pretty impressive results. They've discovered quite a few new animals.

      http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/COML_Showcase_Public_R...

They also have some great pictures.

      http://www.coml.org/medres/highlights2006/highlights200...

      http://www.coml.org/medres/highlights2006/images_hopcro...

      http://www.coml.org/medres/high2005/highlightimages.htm

      http://www.coml.org/medres/Iceocean/iceocean.htm

The Mar-Eco group, studying the Northern Mid-Atlantic, has a lot of interesting stuff.

     http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/News_release_from_the_...

      http://www.mar-eco.no/mareco_news/2006

One of the projects of the census is "Tagging Pacific Pelagics." Pelagic means things that live in or around the sea, such as surfers. When I read the book Red Tag Comes Back, they used a colored tag on a fish to figure out where the fish went. Today they use satellite communications.

      http://www.toppcensus.org/Web/Updates.aspx?WG=6&Tab=15

One single tuna fish traveled 25,000 miles in 600 days, crossing the Pacific three times. I guess if I was a Tuna I might do the same thing.

      http://www.toppcensus.org/Web/FeatureDetails.aspx?id=32&WG=6

The Sooty Shearwater is a bird that lives in New Zealand, at least part of the year. They wander around to Japan, Siberia, Alaska and western North America, occasionally western South America, and back to the New Zealand area. They've been tracked 39,000 miles in 200 days. I think this is because they are horrible navigators and get lost a lot.

http://www.toppcensus.org/Web/FeatureDetails.aspx?id=82&WG=9

http://press.ucsc.edu/text.asp?pid=919

Now you know the story of Grandma Ruth.

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Spam Scam

I whine and complain regularly about the spam I receive, to the President (who never reads my email), various politicians and bureaucrats, my cats, and anybody else who will listen. The cats are the most attentive, but I believe that's just because it's cold outside and they want to come in.

Someone has to be buying that stuff the spammers are peddling, or the spammers would quit spamming.

Where does all that spam come from? Most of it comes from people like you and me. The majority of spam today is coming from ordinary computerists on DSL or cable internet. You acquire a SpamThru-type trojan and voila! You're a spammer too!

      http://www.secureworks.com/analysis/spamthru/

James recently blocked all outgoing email on upperspace.net that doesn't go through our smtp servers. The majority of outgoing email on our ISP was outgoing spam. That surprised me. Local people in Mayes county, Oklahoma are spamming! They don't even know it, because the spam is loaded onto their computer surreptitiously and the spam is sent out in the background.

How can you make sure you're not a spammer? Two easy steps.

1. Update Windows

2. On the Start menu click Run, then enter "mrt".

That's Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool. It should clear out the popular trojans. James will be happy to help if you have any questions:  james@upperspace.com.

Stock Spam

I thought it was pretty strange that all these people are using spam to hype stocks. Then I figured it out. They only hype thinly traded stocks. They accumulate the stock over a period of weeks or months, then they send out millions of emails touting it as a great buy.

In a stock that normally trades only a few thousand shares per day, it can really drive the price up if 50 or 500 people buy 2000 shares apiece. In fact, the stock price may double or triple in the space of a few days if people keep buying it. People may see a rise in volume and price, so they jump on the bandwagon. Then the spammers sell their holding, and the stock is back to its original price before you know it.

The company itself may have no idea who's behind it all. It is somewhat illegal to manipulate a stock price. But then, it's also illegal to spam people. Look how well that's enforced. Someone could win the 2008 Presidential election if they'd promise to stop spam.

Let's take a look at Equipment and Systems Engineering, Inc. That's a small company in Miami that makes sodium hypochlorite water treatment systems for use in Latin America and the Caribbean. They have annual sales of 1.5 to 2 million dollars. Their stock price has declined from 20 cents to around 6 cents per share this year. That seems like a fair price for the company. The company seems normal except for a possibly funny financing deal.

      http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/656628_FR23.pdf
      http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk187/656628_FR16.pdf

Around the first of this month, millions of emails were sent out, pushing the stock (EQSE) with things like "Search your favorite financial information site and become a believer" and "An earth shattering release is expected out of the company any day."

But before this email went out, the spammers (or the ones who hired the spammers) started buying a lot of stock in the company. They had to do this over a period of weeks or months to keep the price from going up.

Then, after the spam went out around the first of the month, there were enough suckers to drive the price of the stock to 2 or 3 times its original value of 6 cents.

It looks like the spammers started selling on December 5th, when the volume went up over 2 million shares per day and the price rose above 15 cents. The selling was over by the 8th, and the volume is down about 90 percent now. The price is now 8 cents per share.

      http://www.pinksheets.com/quote/chart.jsp?symbol=EQSE&d...

They sold their stock for prices between 7 and 18 cents per share, probably around 14 cents average. They may have doubled their money. If they made up 1/4 of the volume on those 4 days, they would have made well over $100,000 on this deal.

One thing that is interesting to me is that I could make money on this type of scam. If I get one of the early spams, buy the stock before the price goes up very far, and can manage to dump the stock before the price goes down, I could join the spammers and make some money.

I won't be doing that, however. It is not consistent with my investment philosophy. I prefer to buy stock and hold it until the company goes flat broke.

      http://blog.wired.com/business/2006/11/when_youre_an_o.html

      http://www.spamnation.info/stats/index.html

I use Spambayes to block spam. It gets over 90% of the spam with no false positives. You have to train it.

      http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

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MPAA Pretexters

After the HP Board of Directors made the term "pretexting" famous, some politicians recognized an opportunity for some cheap publicity and passed a law against pretending to be someone else in order to obtain personal information under false pretenses. The MPAA lobbied against this, and managed to get the scope of the law reduced. The MPAA uses pretexting (i.e., fraud) to obtain personal information under false pretenses so they can sue people.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/12/the_practic...

GSA Cuts Audits?

Lurita, the new chief of the General Services Administration, is trying to limit the ability of the agency's inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste. Lurita said that oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce. I did not make this up!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Afghanistan Opium

Iraq's economy may be in shambles, but Afghanistan had a record opium crop this year, supplying 90 percent of the world's heroin.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Landsat Realtime

Get your near realtime (i.e., slightly falsetime) Landsat images here:

http://earthnow.usgs.gov/earthnow_app.html?sessionId=a5...

Jupiter Years

How old are you in Saturn years?

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/age/

Edison National Historic Site

You can download historic recordings from the Edison National Historic Site site. Some of these are pretty interesting.

http://www.nps.gov/archive/edis/edisonia/sounds.html

Consulting

The South Carolina State Highway commission got chastised for spending too much money on consultants. So they hired some consultants for $200/hour to help them figure out how not to use so many consultants. Those people have White House potential!

http://greenvilleonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/...

It's a little like Colorado's fiscal responsibility. They overpaid welfare recipients millions of dollars with their new software system over the past two years. I assume this has cut the poverty rate.

http://cbs4denver.com/investigates/local_story_34209054...

Milking 9/11

In New York City, the EPA is spending $7,000,000 million dollars to clean buildings in southern Manhattan. They said the buildings got dirty after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. They must be running out of ideas on how to spend money on the plane crashes of 9/11/2001. Either that or it hasn't rained much in Manhattan over the past five years.

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1813972006

Eminent Domain

Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities could seize land from one private owner and give it to another private owner for things like commercial development. The state of New Jersey said, "That's nothing. Watch this."

Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a city can seize someone's property and set it aside for "open space."

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-10/1...

Ed Mezvinsky

Former Iowa Congressman Ed has a son named Marc who is dating Chelsea Clinton. But Ed has other problems. He got suckered into "just about every different kind of African-based scam we've ever seen," according to federal prosecutor Bob Zauzmer.

Ed traveled to Nigeria several times and lost over $3 million dollars to the Nigerian scammers. He ended up stealing from clients and in-laws to pay his Nigerian partners. Then Ed ended up in jail.

Ed may sound particularly stupid, but remember -- he was a U.S. Congressman. Blowing $3 million in a foreign country is nothing to a Congressman.

http://www.blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/12/father_...

Brazilian Flying

http://www.avweb.com/news/pelican/193965-1.html

Huh?

CNN Headline: "Bush Seeks Advice on Iraq"

Why didn't he ask me four years ago?

Spider Boat

This is a REAL catamaran. It's supposed to do 60 knots.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/northwest/story/6250...

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=ilwaco+spider&m=text

Verizon Dollars and Cents

This is a really funny story. Verizon Wireless quoted a guy .002 cents per minute for air time on his cell phone in Canada. He was charged .002 dollars per minute. So far it's just a normal mistake. The funny part is when about five people at Verizon are completely unable to understand the difference between .002 cents and .002 dollars. Even the supervisors were clueless.

      http://www.verizonfails.ytmnd.com/

      http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/transcription-j...

      http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-...

Oops.

Rashid Rauf was one of the ringleaders of the recent terrorist plot in London. Remember? That's the one that made it illegal to carry shampoo, hand lotion, or napalm onto airliners in packages larger than 4 ounces.

Well, it turns out that Rashid won't be charged with bombing, terrorism, or illegal possession of contact lens solution. His case has been moved from the anti-terrorism court to the regular court where he will face forgery charges. The Queen of England apologizes for inconveniencing airline passengers across the globe.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6175427.stm

Springtime on Mars

This is an outstanding video.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/13/springtim...

Facts is Facts

I've read fairly regularly about the White House distorting, suppressing, or fabricating science to meet political goals, but I did not realize this was as pervasive as it is.

10,600 U.S. researchers, including 52 Nobel Laureates, have signed a statement protesting political interference in the scientific process. If I was a researcher I'd sign it too. It really gripes me when politicians distort or suppresses scientific facts and discoveries. It reminds me of the "good old days," back when Galileo was in jail.

All three of these links are worth reading.

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6178213.stm

      http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference...

      http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/10600-scientis...

Transporting Coins

If you drive to Canada, you'd better make sure your ashtray doesn't have more than $5 in pennies and nickels or you're liable to end up in jail. New Treasury regulations prohibit carrying more than $5 in pennies and nickels out of the country, or shipping more than $100 worth. That's to keep people from melting them down for the copper. Max penalties are $10,000 fine and 5 years in jail.

I'd be in favor of doing away with pennies and using coins instead of bills for $1. But I don't care too much about it as long as I can still spend the money in some form or another.

http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/index.cfm?flash=yes&act...

Where in the Internet Are You?

This really works!

http://map-o-net.com/

Dad's 78s

My dad has a few hundred old 78 rpm records. You can buy any of them for $1 each, or all of them for $.50 each. There will be a listing, photos, and mp3 files of them at http://xpda.com/dad78s in a day or two. You can download the mp3 files free. They aren't quite CD-quality.

Pictures of Today!

It snowed on the first of December.

Swings and Deer Tracks:

Pryor Creek:

Frozen Berries:

Cold Road:

Climax Mine, Colorado:

Leadville International Airport:

Maroon Bells and Pyramid Peak, from the west:

Friday, December 01, 2006

Twenty Seconds and a Box Canyon

A box canyon is a canyon with steep sides and an end, so that it looks like a 3-sided box. In aviation, the term is used to describe valleys that may not necessarily have such steep sides, but they may as well be vertical because the sides and end of the valleys rise faster than a plane can climb.

Box canyons are fairly popular places to kill yourself in an airplane. Suppose you're flying along around some mountains, and see a nice, wide valley to fly up. Maybe it's a couple miles wide. Maybe you don't really notice that the terrain is rising as you go up the valley. It's hard to tell just by looking.

As you fly into the valley, you eventually notice that the trees are getting bigger. And the valley is getting narrower. And then you notice that it doesn't look like you can climb fast enough to clear the end of the valley. So you decide to turn around. But the valley is too narrow to make the turn. At this point, your options are extremely limited. If you can't climb out and you can't turn around, you are going to hit the ground. It has something to do with the laws of physics.

You might ask who would be stupid enough to do something like this. It turns out that quite a few people are. Unlike some lethal aviation traps, this one does not require large amounts of stupidity. It seems safe at first, but things get gradually worse. If you don't realize it before it's too late, then it's too late.

Here are some recent examples from the NTSB. The majority of "box canyon" accidents are fatal.

      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...
      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...

In this accident, a flight instructor and student stalled their plane into the ground, trying to turn around in a box canyon:

      http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief ...

You can create an artificial box canyon if you use controlled airspace and skyscrapers instead of mountains. And you can kill yourself if you fly into one. But in an artificial box canyon it's easier to violate the laws of the FAA and escape, as opposed to the laws of physics controlling a natural box canyon. Even so, you have to think ahead.

Baseball pitcher Cory Lidle died in a famous accident about six weeks ago. It has been all over the news. He was flying with a flight instructor up the East River, just east of Manhattan.

They were flying about 600 feet high, lower than the buildings on the left. At 1200 feet and above was controlled airspace, and there were clouds at 1800 feet. On the left, on the right, and ahead of them was controlled airspace. They were flying up an artificial box canyon, 2100 feet wide.

But they were 400 feet left of the right edge when they began their 180° turn to the left. The wind was blowing from the right at 13 knots, effectively reducing their turning diameter by about another 400 feet. Even so, they could have made the turn. It would have required a 53° bank with 1.7 g's.

That is possible to do, but it's not normal. It's substantially steeper than the "steep turns" required to get a pilot license. They didn't turn that sharp, at least not at first. They ended up making too wide a turn, hit a building, and died.

They started the turn at 2:41:20 pm. Twenty seconds later, they were both dead.

What were the alternatives? Lots. Call for clearance and fly over Central Park. Bust Class B airspace. Fly unannounced into LaGuardia airport and land in the big middle of everything. It would have been better than dying. But it just didn't seem that dangerous when they started the turn.

      http://ntsb.gov/Pressrel/2006/ ...

      http://ntsb.gov/Pressrel/2006/ ...

Since the accident, the FAA has required airplanes flying up the East River to be under air traffic control. That will make it quicker and easier to get permission to fly out of that box canyon.

Secret Interrogation

The CIA used to have secret prisons where they held enemies of the state without charge. No longer. Sure, the prisons are still there, and the prisoners have not been charged. But it's not secret any more. Bush explained that the prisons are scattered around the world, and that "alternative interrogation methods" are used, rather than torture.

      http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITI ...

I think I would prefer the CIA's interrogation techniques to the electric drills commonly used in Baghdad. But I also think that people should not be arbitrarily imprisoned.

The White House said that the prisoners (or detainees) in these secret (but publicly acknowledged) prisons should not be allowed lawyers lest they reveal the details of these alternative interrogation techniques.

The government said in court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...

I think the damage would be political more than anything else, particularly since the "alternative interrogation techniques" are fairly well documented.

      http://hrw.org/backgrounder/us ...

      http://www.iht.com/articles/20 ...

I can imagine myself in a CIA prison, enjoying long hours chained against a wall standing up, when the CIA man slaps me in the belly and says, "Well, Bob, we've determined you're innocent. These long months of alternative interrogation have finally paid off."

"Great!" I reply. "When can I go home?"

"Well, there's a problem with that. We can never let you leave, because now you know our secret interrogation techniques."

Blue Screen of Death

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is that screen of white text on a blue background that you occasionally see when Windows crashes. It is not too common on XP, but I have seen it (and caused it, for that matter.)

The natural response to the Blue Screen of Death, genetically bred into generations of humans over the past 20 years, is to hit the hard reset button hard. This is more difficult on a laptop, where you have to hold down the power button for five seconds. There are several varieties of the Blue Screen of Death, but all are instantly recognizable by the white DOS font on the blue background.

In honor of the Blue Screen of Death, Sysinternals has produced the Blue Screen of Death Screensaver. Here's the BSOD Screensaver:

http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk1 ...

Warning: Do NOT put this on someone's computer without their knowledge, else they're liable to hit reset every time the computer goes into screen save mode. Unless it's my brother Mike's computer.

Pay per View DVD?

Load 'n Go is a company that sells iPods pre-loaded with a selection of movies chosen by the purchasers. The company purchases the DVDs and includes them with the iPod. That should make everything legal, right? Not according to the Motion Picture Association of America. They're suing Load 'n Go for copyright infringement.

Let me go over this again. Load 'n Go buys a DVD or two, preloads them onto an iPod, then sells the iPod together with the original DVDs. How can that be illegal?

It's easy. The MPAA pays politicians and lobbyists millions of dollars to get stupid laws passed. They say that you can buy a movie on DVD, but you have to buy it again if you want to put it on your iPod. And that's the law as it stands today. Tomorrow it may be worse.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com ...

Fauxtographic Evidence

This photo appeared in the July 31 issue of Time Magazine...

...along with this caption: "The wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind an armed Hizballah gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the surrounding area ablaze."

There is one minor problem with this. It wasn't a downed Israeli jet that was burning. It fact, it wasn't a jet at all, and jet fuel did not set the surrounding area ablaze. Here's the original caption that the photographer, Bruno Stevens, sent to Time along with the photo:

"Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 -- An Israeli Air Force F16 has alledgedly been shot down while bombing a group of Hezbollah owned trucks, at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher."

After learning more, he changed the caption to this:

"Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 -- The Israeli Air Force bombed a group of Hezbollah chartered trucks parked on the back of large Lebanese Army barracks, at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher, at least one missile was hit, misfiring high into the sky before falling down and starting a huge fire in the barracks' parking lot."

He doesn't seem to be particularly pro-Israel, and in fact he took several photos that make Israel look bad. But this is not one of them. Israel destroyed a missile that would have otherwise been shot at them. I think Time was adding a little fictional sensationalism to the story.

      http://www.lightstalkers.org/t ...

      http://www.time.com/time/magaz ...

      http://www.honestreporting.c ...

Chernobyl

In April 1986, there was a steam explosion, fire, and meltdown in one of the four reactors of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Around 50 or 60 people died as a direct result of the meltdown, and 9,000 more died or will die from the radiation, according to the World Health Organization. Some people claim that number of dead is more like 80,000, and some say it's a lot less than 9,000. 100,000 to 300,000 people were relocated from the area, depending on who you ask.

Here are some good recent photos of the Chernobyl.

      http://englishrussia.com/?p=293

      http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~d ...

I'm sure you remember the March 10, 2004 Junkmail where I included the "Kid of Speed" pho ... . It's about Elena Vladimirovna Filatova, who rode her motorcycle around the Chernobyl area. It turned out that she didn't really ride her cycle into the restricted zone, but the photos are still pretty popular. Her latest web site has some more photos, other projects, and she has corrected some of the "literary license" she took in her original site.

      http://elenafilatova.com/

Tsar Bomba

The USSR "King of Bombs" should probably have been included in the last Junkmail. It was the most powerful bomb ever exploded on earth. Well, it was actually 13,000 feet above the earth when the 50-megaton blast blew.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.or ...

Finnegan's Quarks

James Joyce wrote Finnegan's Wake sometime around 1939. I read a little bit of it, but lost interest due to odd language and lack of submarines and airplanes. This song is in Finnegan's Wake:"

----Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!

George Zweig was a grad student at Cal Tech in 1964 when he proposed the existence of quarks, except he called them Aces. About the same time, Murray Gell-Mann, a really smart guy teaching at the same university, came up with a similar model. Murray named his subatomic particles "quarks," from the song in Finnegan's Wake. "Quark" stuck.

Protons, neutrons, and some other subatomic particles are made up of quarks. An electron is apparently made up of nothing but an electron. There are several other particles made up of quarks.

At Fermilab in Illinois, the Tevatron collider is used to smash protons and antiprotons into each other, going really fast. This annihilates the protons and antiprotons and spews out lots of other subatomic particles.

As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to figure out what's flying out of a collision between a proton and an antiproton. They use the CDF, Collision Detector at Fermilab. Hundreds of physicists from over 60 institutions in 13 countries are working on this.

      http://www.fnal.gov/pub/pressp ...

     http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/%7Ec ...

Last month they announced the discovery of two new subatomic particles, the Σ^-_b and the Σ⁺_b baryons. These each have about six times the mass of a proton, and decay in a tiny fraction of a second. The Σ_b's were predicted to exist in quark theory. The discovered particles exhibit the proper spins of J=1/2 and J=3/2.

      http://www.fnal.gov/pub/pressp ...

I don't understand the details behind this stuff, but it's still pretty interesting. When I learned about atoms, they were made up only of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Atoms have gotten a lot more complex since then.

Another discovery at Fermilab this year was the oscillation of the B_s meson between matter and antimatter at 3 trillion times per second. This seems very strange, but it really happens and may have some big implications.

      http://www.fnal.gov/pub/pressp ...

Humming

Directors of the housing authorities at Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett Washington drive their own cars. Kurt, the director of the Vancouver, Washington Housing Authority, spent 37,000 tax dollars on a new Hummer. He uses it for personal and official driving. That sounds a little fishy to me. I think Kurt needs some fiduciary supervision.

http://www.kirotv.com/news/103 ...

Mars Global Surveyor

The polar ice is retreating -- on Mars. The South Polar Ice Cap has shrunk over the past few years, about 3 meters per year. This was caused almost entirely by greenhouse gas. That's because the ice caps are mostly made of the notorious greenhouse gas CO₂ instead of H₂O.

Mars Global Surveyor took these photos of the same area from 1999 to 2005.

http://www.msss.com/mars_image ...

The spacecraft was launched on November 7, 1996.

Mars Global Surveyor seems to have died last November 2, just 5 days short of 10 years of service.

Here's a 1997 photo showing layered rock in the Valles Marineris.

Here are some more rock layers from Valles Marineris.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/n ...

More on mars:

http://xpda.com/mars

Today's Stupid Software Patent

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has excelled once again, this time with patent number 7028023. It was issued last April to LSI Logic. It patents the stunning new concept of using a linked list with multiple sets of pointers for multiple sequences.

This has commonly been used in programming since the days of Algol 68. I used this technique for the first time more than 25 yeas ago. Doubly linked lists are common in Computer Science textbooks, and linking graphical data in both X and Y directions has been done since Pythagoras. Well, at least since the IBM 1130.

http://www.patentstorm.us/pate ...

Deer Hunting

A guy named Joseph was driving his Chevy Cavalier along a road one night in Vermont with his daughter and girlfriend. He spotted a deer out in a meadow. He took off toward the deer, shined a light on it, and rammed it with his car.

The deer was a decoy. A game warden and two deputies were hiding in the bushes, hoping to catch "spotlighters." Joseph is in trouble.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress ...

Colliers

I bought a copy of a 1949 Colliers magazine. The article I wanted to read was OK, but I thought the magazine itself was more interesting.

In the last Junkmail I mentioned Ben Scott Custer, the captain of the USS Norfolk Sound in World War II. He went on to become a rear admiral and president of Columbia University. He also was on a plane that crash landed in the backwoods of Canada, and spent a few days getting out. Here's the article he wrote for Colliers:

http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk1 ...

This is from a Camel cigarette ad:

In a recent test, hundreds of men and women, from coast to coast, smoked Camels, and only Camels, for 30 days -- an average of 1 to 2 packs a day. Each week, their throats were examined by noted throat specialists. After a total of 2470 thorough examinations, these doctors reported NO THROAT IRRITATION DUE TO SMOKING CAMELS!

"More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."

Bots and DoS and Spam

You may have noticed that you've been getting a lot more spam recently. Spam is on the increase worldwide. How do you handle the excess spam? Here's are a few ideas. Spam and jamcakes, spam and eggs, or spam cheeseburgers:

In January 2004, President Bush signed the Can-Spam act into law.

      http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline ...

In 2004, Bill Gates said the spam problem would be solved by 2006.

      http://www.cbsnews.com/stories ...

The spam problem could be fixed right away. All that needs to be done is to prosecute the people (a) sending the spam, or (b) using the spam for advertising. (b) is a lot easier, since you only have to follow the money.

(a) is a little harder because spammers are sending a large percentage of spam from zombie computers. They send out a trojan such as SpamThru, then control a net of thousands of computers. When it's time to spam, each of these zombie computers sends out a few thousand emails. The computer users usually don't even know about it.

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2 ...

But it is still possible to track down the spam senders. The U.S. government certainly has the resources. They could stop 95% of the spam inundating my inbox if they would only enforce the law. Maybe they're too busy keeping bottles of hand lotion off airplanes.

I went to the FTC web site to see how to stop spam. Among other things such as forwarding my spam to my internet service provider, they recommend opting out. Right. That just confirms you have read the spam, possibly promoting you a more active email list.

Then I called the FTC help line. Yeah, yeah, I was bored. After three minutes of recordings, I got a message saying the same thing the web site said. I never did get the option to speak to a real person.

Then I called someone with public relations at the FTC. A human answered the phone! I asked how many Can-Spam cases the FTC has prosecuted. She said she'd call back and let me know. I'll update the web site (http://xpda.com/junkmail?issue=186) if I find out.

[ I found out! She called back and explained that the FTC has brought 89 spam-related cases against 241 corporate and personal defendants. 26 of these were prosecuted under the Can-Spam act. So the FTC is not ignoring the problem -- they just haven't gotten to my spammers yet. 11/30/06 ]

A lot of people have must have noticed the recent surge in spam. Here are a bunch of articles about it.

      http://www.networkworld.com/ne ...

      http://newsblaze.com/story/200 ...

      http://www.wired.com/wired/arc ...

      http://www.sci-tech-today.com/ ...

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2 ...

      http://www.eweek.com/article2/ ...

      http://www.eweek.com/article2/ ...

      http://www.networkworld.com/ne ...

Flying Rocks

A couple of Junkmails ago I mentioned a meteorite that was discovered in Kansas using ground penetrating radar. I thought that was pretty cool. I also mentioned a meteorite smashing into a house in Germany and starting a fire. (The Reuters links have gone away.)

      http://space.about.com/b/a/256 ...

Phil Plait mentioned that while this is possible, it is highly unlikely.

      http://www.badastronomy.com/ba ...

He's right. Most likely the cottage burned down due to natural causes, such as electricity or man-made fire. Maybe that's why the Reuters links all went away?

The Bad Astronomy blog is pretty good. It even contains facts.

      http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog

In 1992 it was highly unlikely for a meteorite to smash into a car in New York, but that time it really happened.

      http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/ap ...

It happened on a Friday night in October when lots of people were at high school football games with video and still cameras. Here's a nice photo of the meteorite on the way down, after it started breaking up.

Here are some videos:

http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/ ...

Details:

http://www.astro.uwo.ca/%7Epbr ...

Border Guards and Bribery

In Texas, border guards are now taking bribes to allow illegal aliens and contraband into the U.S.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/ne ...

The Texas Ethics Commission took action. Now Texas officials are no longer required to report the amount of cash they receive as a gift, only that they received some cash.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/ne ...

The War on Tourism

Headlines: "Acid bomb detonated in Walmart." The fact is that a couple of kids put some stomach antacid into a plastic bottle of Coke, and left it in Walmart to make a mess. It makes a pretty decent pop when the bottle bursts, but it's just not as scary as an "acid bomb" being "detonated." Unfortunately, thanks to the current climate of fear, those kids face felony charges.

http://morningsentinel.maineto ...

Real Climate

It's hard to separate the science from the politics in climatology. There are a lot of people pushing one way or another, partly because there is a lot of money affected by the politics involved. Here is a good site by some top people in the field. The site comes complete with facts and references, without the frequently associated political slant one direction or another.

http://www.realclimate.org

This blurb says a lot about the climate science you read in the news:

"However, there is a bit of a cottage industry of people who micro-parse every new paper to see how it projects onto a narrow view of the climate change debate regardless of their actual relevance. This is a travesty of the way science is supposed to work and all too often ends up getting the story completely wrong."

http://www.realclimate.org/i ...

So where does the world stand with climate change, global warming, and other catch phrases? The earth is getting a little warmer. Some of this is caused by greenhouse gases produced by people burning coal, oil, and gas. The rise in sea level is barely measurable. Most climate models predict a more rapid temperature increase in the future, along with associated problems, especially if the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions continue.

I was pretty skeptical about global warming a few years ago, but there has been a lot of hard data collected over the past few years that convinced me there must be something to it. I'm pretty sure that people will continue to burn coal, oil, and gas as long as they are cheapest energy sources available, although there should be a trend toward solar, wind, and nuclear energy.

And the politics of it? One of my elected representatives to the U.S. Senate calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." I think he must have forgotten about Y2K.