Tulip

Posted on December 22, 2007 by Arthur

Yesterday A tulip shaped island?(I think), the International Herald Tribune posted an article about Dutch plans to create a tulip-shaped island in the North Sea. The plan was brought up by the Dutch Innovation Platform (Dutch-only) with the goal to showcase the Dutch expertise in water management.

The idea is also mentioned at Wired’s, to be exactly, right here. The posting (it’s a blog, get it?) fires a couple of potshots at the idea, and for this, the author got (quite) some flak and history lessons with the usual bits of chauvinism.

That said, the idea is actually refreshing but not new: Earlier, Dubai decided to create 2 palm-shaped islands, which (naturally and intentionally) can only be seen from high above. With the rise of the (online) availability of satellite pictures (having become commodities, as you will), this is probably going to be an upward trend. This also brings me to the ever-mentioned claim: ‘The Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible in space’. It’s not (See also this article at space.com).

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Mars Express

Posted on December 19, 2007 by Arthur

I was reading about ‘the active glacier’, found by the ESA’s Mars Express earlier this week, which led me to look up the Mars Express website. Excellent (and amazing) imagery. My favourite one is the photo of the Cydonia region. While we’re at it, you may remember that (quite a while ago) Google launched maps for Mars, so here you go.

The ESA has been plugging away to make their websites as user-centric as possible: there are desktop downloads available in the form of screensavers and wallpaper. While I’m not really into screensavers (I have been running the same screensaver for ages, it appears: only recently I decided to switch to a screensaver depicting an aquarium in 3D OpenGL), I thought that the Mars Express wallpapers would have been interesting enough if they were available in the 16:9 resolution ratios (like 1280 x 800). They’re not and frankly, I’m too lazy to start cutting those images up.

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Shoelaces

Posted on December 16, 2007 by Arthur

Earlier this week, while fastening new shoelaces I was reminded of the fact that, during my life at my parental home, we (seemingly) never used to run out of shoelaces. I think one of my parents was smart enough to consider that kids always seem to break shoelaces at any time of the day any year. There used to be a plastic container full of spare shoelaces in one of the cabinets in the kitchen.

Shoelaces also reminds me of a short story (by longtime Internet friend Alan Corre) properly titled ‘Shoelaces’.

Last week, the BBC sported an article by Bill Gates (nonetheless!), who gave his views about which skills you need to succeed. I generally agree with his remarks, especially the following sections:

Beyond that, however, I don’t think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science.
[…]
Having that kind of curiosity about the world helps anyone succeed, no matter what kind of work they decide to pursue.

Curiosity and critical thinking go hand in hand: I was fortunate that my dad (who was both firmly set in religion and science) was willing to give us space to explore and discover things on our own and question everything that was around us that didn’t make sense. In many of these cases, the local library offered solutions. If you’re a kid, there’s only one advice I’d give: Read a lot of books, from novels to scientific books.

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Weatherwise

Posted on December 16, 2007 by Arthur

It looksSatellite image of the Dec 16 Winterstorm of 2007 like we’re in the midst of the winterstorm that earlier pested Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. The (local) forecast tells that we can expect a mix of heavy snowfall (15 cms and up) and (possibly) rain during the Monday morning hours. It is a kind of silly to see rain being mentioned: the last couple of weeks, the temperature has been hanging around the -5 to -10 degrees zone.

I saw that Marian (at the Internationalist) uploaded a couple of short movies to Google (one, two and three), which show what a snowstorm looks like over here (I’m looking at you, Europeans). This reminds me that at one time, Alfons came over around Winter time just to see what such a snowstorm looked like. If I’m not wrong, he missed it by a week.

For now, I haven’t decided to wait it out or start clearing out the driveway: At this stage, the snow (and pellets) are light enough to brush aside with a smaller shovel. It won’t be when it starts raining.

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Warped

Posted on December 15, 2007 by Arthur

Via MetaFilter: A NASA article about faster than light traveling, space colonization and science fiction. The article is an excellent overview of current propulsion techniques and what we’d need to travel to the nearest habitable planet.

If you’re into SF, Star-Trek and that and you are slightly unfamiliar with the paradoxes that traveling at the speed of light brings, you’re in for a disappointment. We don’t know enough about physics and we need (at least) make breakthroughs really soon now.

Charles Stross (author of Glasshouse and Halting State) has more sobering thoughts, highlighting the issues with sending a manned mission to (for example) Proxima Centauri: he notes that getting a vehicle at 10% of the speed of light requires the equivalent energy output of 400 megatons of nuclear missiles. Naturally, since we don’t want to overshoot Proxima Centauri, we need that same amount of energy to decelerate:

For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom.

Bruce Sterling wrote in 2004 (on colonizing Mars) that it’s a lot cheaper to colonize the Gobi desert than Mars. The two places are literally much alike: ‘they’re both ugly, inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay’:

On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.

More on this I will discuss in 2416, but I’m in a rush now: I have to travel to the future and tell the descendants of my twin-brother that they’re about to discover a wormhole to Proxima Centauri.

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Glacialisaurus

Posted on December 11, 2007 by Arthur

I‘m a Glacialisaurus action pictures.fan of EurekAlert, a site that provides scientific news and achievements in two-bite snack format. The only problem I have with the site is that the articles are short and (generally) don’t provide appropriate links. Take for example this one about that dinosaur find in Antartica: the article mentions digital images (by William Stout) but to actually find some samples, I needed some Google-Fu to see what that thing looked like.

EurekAlert does link to the magazine that features the (published) findings: however, to find detailed information about this, you need to dive deep into the site to find an abstract about the new dino, plus the magical (but technical) full article (PDF format!).

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Time is Tight

Posted on December 9, 2007 by Arthur

Earlier Booker T and the MGsthis weekend I was reminded of Booker T and the MGs: most people know their ‘Green Onions’ hit-song but aren’t aware of other instrumentals they produced and created, like the catchy ‘Time Is Tight’ (sample 30+ seconds). ‘Time is Tight’ is one of those typical ‘who did this song again?’ songs and that mainly because of the recognizable theme/riff (by lead guitarist Steve Cropper) and the typical (classic?) Hammond organ sound (from the hands of Booker T. Jones).

Initially, Booker T and the MGs started out as backing musicians on the (famous) Stax/Volt records, playing for and with artists like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave (Watch for the band in this Sam & Dave video1). Brilliant musicians, clearly underrated and under-appreciated.

When I was working as a programmer on the Old Continent, a fellow programmer once asked me what I was listening to. When I passed on my MD-player, he listened in to this song and quickly returned the thing with a disgusted face, saying that this was ‘old people music’ because his parents were still listening to this crap. I think that was the first time someone called me an ‘old fart’ at age 28. On the plus side, I wouldn’t doubt that this young programmer eventually became a Stax/Volt connoisseur.

Update: Right in time for this

1 I should probably save Sam&Dave for another ‘Past The Bridge’ posting.

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Coffee, huh

Posted on December 9, 2007 by Arthur

The BBC has an article about how coffee protects female memory: A French research team compared women aged 65 (and older) who drank more than 3 cups of coffee per day with those who only drank one per day. Those who drank more apparently showed less decline in memory tests over a four year period. The protective effect didn’t seem to apply to men and the results of the research suggest that women metabolize caffeine differently.

My eyes fell on the ‘See also’ section of that article which link to other (BBC) items on coffee research: Coffee may help relieve gym pain (07), ‘coffee boosts female sex drive’ (06), decaf coffee linked to heart risks (05) and caffeine does not raise blood pressure (02).

I think that covers all of coffee’s important properties. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you have to get up early in the morning, you definitely shouldn’t drink coffee at night.

Update: Coffee’s magical stuff mentioned elsewhere (2 days earlier!)

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Not so, so.

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Arthur

It appears that the US NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) watered down the Iranian threat saying that ‘it has high confidence that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but that it was continuing to enrich uranium‘. This (of course) goes against all the signals that the current Bush administration has been sending to the press. Even at this stage, the President says that we should see this report as a ‘warning signal’. I recall other warning signals.

Earlier, Schreiber testified for a federal committee and promised fireworks: in short, his allegations suggest that a former Canadian Prime Minister improperly acquired large sums of money. There’s a another side to the story: for years Schreiber has been fighting extradition to Germany, where he’s wanted for tax evasion.

We had a major storm heading our way last night and the snow outside looks a bit strange this early. I expect this snow to be hanging around here until Spring 2008.

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On snow and games

Posted on December 2, 2007 by Arthur

Yesterday, we were hit by a snowstorm that apparently took everyone by surprise: After finishing shopping in the local mall, we walked and drove through the very first winter storm to hit our area. This comes right after the Weather Office’s prediction that this year is going to be the coldest Winter. Worst yet: Right on the road to the mall, for some explicably stupid reason, I decided not to bring my camera.

CBC had many reports about the elections in Russia: the most memorable report was the one about the pro-Putin youth group Nashi (BBC link only). It looks like Putin’s party will be winning which will (apparently) make him a prime minister at the end of his presidential term. If that doesn’t sound absurd.

And the last thing I want to bring attention at is the GameSpot incident. In short: a games editor/reviewer gives a game a bad review and is fired afterwards. A good summary can be found at Virtual Fools. I generally don’t read online game magazines because I don’t agree with the superfluous rating systems each of them uses: additionally, I’ve always had my doubts about magazines that review computers games and have the games’ ads prominently on display, simultaneously.

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My. Suck.s

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Arthur

Earlier, I was looking for an OpenWRT version that could run my Linksys WRT54G. This is where I found out that the hardware version of my router (“8”) isn’t supported. Aw. Apparently, Linksys switched to a propriety embedded OS, the [infamous] VxWorks. Aw2.

There are holy wars being fought about routers, particularly which one sucks and which one doesn’t. Personally, I haven’t had many issues with Linksys hardware and the WRT54 I bought this summer (no review!) was a piece of cake to set-up. I wished I had bought the one with that extra USB slot, though.

Talking about that infamous VxWorks: it’s a real-time operating system (Wikipedia) which is competing hard against Microsoft’s Mobile/CE platform. It’s apparently ported to many processors and it powers (and powered) most likely your favourite spacecraft, including the Mars Pathfinder mission. There’s an interesting anecdote about how the software almost threw a kink in the cable, detailed in this article at Microsoft Research (with an interesting follow-up from the JPL).

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Pray, tell, rain

Posted on November 27, 2007 by Arthur

I read that sm_corona_virus.jpgthe Orthodox Church of Cypres has ordered priests to pray for rain on December the 2nd of this year. It appears that this is a routine that has been done before, most recently when a comparable drought struck the island 9 years ago.

BBC also reports that scientists have created a detailed map of Antartica. The images come (primarily) from the Landsat spacecraft and there are plans to make the data available for use in software like ‘Virtual Earth’ and ‘Google Earth’. You may want to view the results right at LIMA, that is, if you can get through the bottleneck (yeah, yeah, it’s a popular site this week).

And last but not least, an excellent (long) article about retrovirusses at The Newyorker. The article discusses the influence virusses had (and have) on our body’s immune system and cancer, and (particularly) about how retrovirusses have become part of our DNA. There’s some interesting commentary about new approaches to tackle HIV (a retrovirus), for example, by accelerating its life cycle (the faster a cell reproduces the more errors it makes, eventually passing non-threatening DNA to future generated cells.). Mind-blowing read. You can read the follow-up discussing over at MetaFilter.

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Strings and Skies

Posted on November 25, 2007 by Arthur

There’s an old Strings and uh… Dutch Polish Swedish British Belgian Luxemburg Czech Hungarian San Marino 18th century saying which explains the correlation between full moon and cold weather: “Clear Skies, Invalid Memory Writes”.

OK. Skip the European geography introduction in the first paragraph: it was cold yesterday (and last night). I managed to get out and buy a cardreader (“Sandisk Extreme USB 2.0 Reader”), for which the local store charged me 35 dollars (pre-tax). Maybe it was so expensive because mine didn’t include the ‘soft pouch’ that Sandisk claims to have included. But I don’t want to sound too cranky: I support the local economy, I guess.

I swept by the (local) music store too, to buy some new strings for The Guitar. Let it be known: I love putting on strings on a guitar, that is, preferably, without the presence of a cat. There’s no reason for a cat to chase (and jump) after guitar strings. After I dealt with the cat, I managed to get to the fun part of having new strings on a guitar: Retuning. If you play guitar a lot, the first string to tune is the low E string (which you can do by ear) and then use the “1/3 tuning method” to tune the other strings.

The only thing I now need to take care of is to tie and cut the ends of the strings so that I don’t poke my (or the cat’s) eyes out while I play.

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