Early mornin' rain...

Except of course, independence air did not use big ol' 707s (Apologies to Gord).

Well, still there on Monday, and today Tuesday.





My wife, ever the practical one, said quickly: "Metro probably has a replacement schedule, and it's cycle isn't over yet."

Well duh. Of course. They replace them all at once. So much for all that fancy schoolin' of mine.

Foundation, Basis, Basement, whatever...:

It was bound to happen.

Since the National Science Foundation has been required to participate in the Grants.gov portal, our programs have been exposed to a whole new customer base. Usually, only the scientific research community pays any attention to our program announcements, funding opportunities, etc., but through Grants.gov you can search on all sorts of words to find opportinities for government funding.

We recently got an application requesting funding of a foundation for a building in Vermont. As in poured concrete.

...as long as it's scientifically poured, and then peer-reviewed, and finally published in the literature...

Hmm, methinks now, "al-Qaeda" stand for "foundation," so...

Twenty-two Year Old Quiz:

...Not for twenty-two year olds - it was twenty-two years ago that this was handed out at a 1983 Caltech psychology class (PSY 12, Breger), and I rescued it from a "basement box" destined for the trash.

Despite the spelling of "gauge" in the introductory paragraph, this test must be originally American--there are several items that are peculiar to this country. I was flummoxed by three of these because I did not grow up here. For non-Americans, I would give a +6 handicap. For non-native English speakers, I would give a +11 handicap.
---
This test does not measure your intelligence, your fluency with words, and certainly not your mathematical ability. It will, however, give you some gauge of your mental flexibility and creativity. In the three years since we ("we" is unknown) developed this test, we've found few people who could solve more than half of the 24 questions on the first try. Many, however, reported getting answers long after the test had been set aside--particularly at unexpected moments when their minds were relaxed, and some reported solving all the questions over a period of several days. Take this as your personal challenge.

INSTRUCTIONS: Each question below contains the initials of words that will make it correct. Find the missing words. For example, 26 = L. of the A. = Letters of the Alphabet. GOOD LUCK!!!

1. 26 = L. of the A.
   
2. 7 = W. of the A. W.
   
3. 1,001 = A. N.
   
4. 12 = S. of the Z.
   
5. 54 = C. in a D. (with the J's)
   
6. 9 = P. in the S. S.
   
7. 88 = P. K.
   
8. 13 = S. on the A. F.
   
9. 32 = D. F. at which W. F.
   
10. 18 = H. on a G. C.
    
11. 90 = D. in a R. A.
    
12. 200 = D. for P. G. in M.
    
13. 8 = S. on a S. S.
    
14. 3 = B. M. (S. H. T. R.)
    
15. 4 = Q. in a G.
    
16. 24 = H. in a D.
    
17. 1 = W. on a U.
    
18. 5 = D. in a Z. C.
    
19. 57 = H. V.
    
20. 11 = P. on a F. T.
    
21. 1,000 = W. that a P. is W.
    
22. 29 = D. in F. in a L. Y.
    
23. 64 = S. on a C. B.
    
24. 40 = D. and N. of the G. F.
    

There are no real answers for this, so whatever makes sense and fits is the answer.
---
Let me know how you do over the next few days and weeks, and which category you fit into. No hints! That's missing the point of this!

Some of these came to me months later, out of the blue. That is the point.
--------------------------
Sent from either my Newton2100 or my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Advertising babble:

Marketing departments must think we are idiots.

It irks me to see things that are plainly there because they "sound good," and which don't stand up to a logical train of thought, produced in a few seconds. Viz.:



This is Glucerna, a drink for diabetics, but it could just as well be any drink, ice cream, or similar product with vanilla.

Why on Earth include the term 'homemade'? Have you ever heard of vanilla that was homemade? This century? Who bothers to go through all the trouble of mashing the seed pods in alcohol any more? Not even the most devoted scratch cook I know makes "homemade vanilla." To top it all off, in small type, right under that, it says "Artificially Flavored."

All because 'homemade' has such happy overtones, and not for any reason that has anything to do with the process of manufacturing itself.

So, homemade artificial vanilla: yum.

Harrumph.

Farewell, still:

Well, Metro is apparently unaware of the demise of independence air... (at least as of 7 AM this morning):


We'll see if this lasts into next week...

Lots of coverage of the last flights from Dulles last night on TV, and I heard tonight that JetBlue is bidding for their Boston traffic with $25 fares. Tempting, but then there are the Boston hotel rates...

Farewell:

Overstepping, couldn't get in step, broke a leg.

I ride on the same position in the subway car each day. And each day I saw this poster for independence air in front of the open door at one of the stops:



My question was, would the poster be here on Friday, the day after independence went out of business? How effective is the Metro's advertising revenue section? Would they strip the poster as soon as flyi.com could no longer pay for the space?

More tomorrow.

E-addiction

Recently, I made fun of a friend for using his BlackBerry during a party. The devices are devilishly addictive, and the term "CrackBerry," used by yet someone else, struck me as particularly apt.

I realized however, that I was actually in denial regarding my own addiction when I walked straight into a glass door in the midst of using my blasted device. I have also realized that there are other effects - I had the experience of being able to recall someone's e-mail address, but not their real name, when I knew them quite well.

The social norms that guide use of these devices have changed. Seeing someone yammering away to themselves on the street is no longer a sign of dementia. Apparently, it is acceptable to wear earphones (or even headphones) when out with one's friends or parents. I recently saw a table at a restaurant where all four people were talking on their cell-phones. One of them spoke on the cell for the whole meal.

I have posted before about electronic disruption of family life, and how television was the end of most conversations over the neighbourly fence. These portable devices are yet another layer insulating us from our fellow citizens, and especially from the natural world. There are many SciFi stories about an eventual rejection of these devices, but I am sceptical - those attitudes will always be at the fringes of society, joining the Luddites and the Unabomber in their historical irrelevance. What is important is how our social contract is affected -or not- by these devices, and not how they help or hinder our lives.

(While typing out this message, I got on the wrong subway line. Sigh.)

...Now, if I could only get some help for my aching thumbs...
--------------------------
Sent from either my Newton2100 or my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Frederick August Otto S.

...this was actually a draft from Christmas 2004, but sometimes it just takes a while for me to post things...

And Mr. Schwartz is no more. I passed an empty F.A.O. building in San Francisco and it made me sad - but I didn't go to F.A.O. as a kid, I went to Hamleys!

Apparent Santa Wandering:

I have been attending some discussions lately where we discuss the upcoming International Polar Year activities.

One of the NASA boffins was going on about how many poles there are: the Moon has poles where we hope to find water for lunar bases, Mars has polar caps with water and carbon dioxide ice, and Uranus has poles that ocasionally point at the Sun. Heck, even the Sun itself has poles, although they aren't very cold.

The talk about the Sun having poles made me realize that because poles are simply where the axis of rotation intercepts the surface, there are bodies out there that have no poles in the usual sense: the chaotic tumblers. These are bodies that are oddly shaped enough that they are dynamically unstable, and do not rotate regularly. You may have seen or even done the old physics demo where a heavy textbook is held shut with rubber bands, and then tossed while being spun around various axes. Spinning the book around the short and the long axes works fine, but that intermediate one... there's that unstable wobble. Now imagine an enormous rock doing this in space. Hyperion, one of Saturn's moons, is a chaotic tumbler, and the recent visitor Toutatis (about which I posted last year), is another.

Now imagine if Santa were on one of these bodies, having to move his toy factory every few days.

RSS Feeds and the RSS Visualizer Mac screensaver:

Bring up the RSS feed from your favourite source as a screensaver on an (OS 10.4) Mac. Nifty!

I often have this screensaver set to the BBC International Headlines RSS feed, but I only just figured out how to customize this to more than the default set of RSS feeds supplied by Apple within Safari...

You need to make sure your desired RSS feed's URL is saved by Safari before you can get this to work.

1. a. Launch Safari and navigate to your desired source.
b. Check to see if they have an RSS feed (should be on the front page if they are worth their web-savvy salt, and Safari will display an RSS button in the address bar if it can detect it). RSS feeds are sometimes called XML feeds.
c. Click on the RSS button or link link to display the RSS feed within Safari. You should see a list of titles and brief excerpts of postings.
d. Bookmark this page (the RSS feed, and NOT the website itself - you should see an URL ending with .xml).
e. Close all Bookmark management related windows! This ensures you are actually saving the URL within Safari's Bookmarks.

2. a. Launch the System Preferences app from the Apple menu
b. Click on the "Desktop & Screen Saver" icon.
c. Click on "Screen Saver"
d. In the Screen Savers list, select "RSS Visualizer"
e. click the "Options..." button
f. select your desired RSS feed from the displayed list of all your Safari RSS feeds, and click the "Done" button

Sigh. Don't display your own blog RSS. That's just plain vanity. Give your family grief for not doing it.

One feed that gets me laughing (caution, may be mildly offensive to some): The Onion - weekly

Apple Chat:

A good example of why electronic chats do not work well. I wasn't sure whether I was really speaking to an Apple agent, or whether this was an "Agent" as in an artifically intelligent agent that was parsing my posts against a FAQ...

Agent:
Thank you for contacting Apple Chat support. My name is Abhishek, please give me a moment while i access your records in our database.

Agent:
Thank you for your patience, may i know if you are calling about an existing issue or will this be a new one?Paul:
Hello Abhishek, good day to you wherever you may be. A new Issue - headphone port on an iMac.

Agent:
Hi Paul, how may i help you today?

Paul:
When I first purchased the iMac, I tried headphones and external speakers, and they did not work. I assumed I had the wrong jack and sold my speakers. I just bought a new set, and they don't work either (I have tested them on other equipment, so I am fairly sure it is the port on the iMac).

Agent:
As i understand you are unable to connect the external speakers to the imac using the jack, is that correct?

Paul:
I can connect, but the sound is not correct - it is distorted.

Agent:
I will send you an article that addresses the issue....

Agent:
I have pushed a page onto your browser, it should come up on the right side of your Chat window.

Agent:
The url for the page is ...

Agent:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86810

Paul:
Yes, thank you I have seen this one - the speakers do have a 3.5mm metal analog jack, but it does not seem to go all the way into the Headphone jack on the iMac.

Agent:
May i know if you have purchased the jack as per the configuration shown in article?

Paul:
Yes, the speakers were bought from Apple.

Agent:
I would suggest you to take the headphone and speaker set to the Apple Store and have them check the jack with the other Apple computers....

Paul:
I have tried the speakers on my Mac laptop, and they work there...

Paul:
These speakers work on other Macs. Other speakers have not worked with this iMac. Ergo, it is most likely the port on this iMac.

Agent:
I believe the issue is related to the port of the imac, as you have tested the jack with other Macs.

Agent:
I would advise you to take the imac to the nearest Apple Servie Provider and they will be in a better poition to help you with the issue.

Paul:
OK, thank you for your help today, Abhishek.

Agent:
You are welcome.

Agent:
Is there anything else i can assist you with?

Paul:
Unless there is some way of installing it myself (I have reset the midplane on this machine before), I think we are done.

Agent:
Is it okay for me to end the chat?

Paul:
Yes, sorry. I did not realize I had to actively end it. Thanks again.

Chat Session Ended, Goodbye. (5010)

...Bummer, I was all set to blast my new JBL Creatures, but it looks like I will be sending the iMac off for repair (again).

Dougal's Wild Ride:

I received an interesting e-mail from a friend who is spending a year in England, working in the town of Swindon, near London.

As you may know, traffic in England circulates on the left side of the road. This has many consequences for the design of cars and for traffic flow. Most of these consequences are simply mirror-images of what North American drivers are used to, but they can range from simple adjustments to things that are frighteningly dangerous.

For example, the steering wheels in most British cars are on the right side. Things like the brake and accelerator pedals are not reversed, but the rear view mirrors and the gear shift and parking brake are. This means that while I can easily accelerate and brake in a rented car, I often bang my hand on the right-side door when it's time to use the stick shift, and I will look up and out the window when trying to see who is behind me, rather than looking at the rear-view mirror. That much can be adapted to fairly easily, but judging where I am driving in my lane is a different matter - and very difficult when on a narrow street, or parallel parking. Shearing off rear view mirrors is a common problem for tourists.

However, getting used to the traffic flow is what is truly unnerving. Driving straight ahead is fine (except on narrow lanes, as noted above), but once you have to make a turn, well, get ready, because your brain just screams WRONG! at you, and you have to consciously turn into what you fear is the oncoming lane. It is left turns that are easy, and right turns that cross traffic.

The real nightmare is the traffic circle, or 'roundabout,' as is called in Britain. Traffic circulates to the left, or clockwise, and Britain is full of these roundabout things. A very famous roundabout happens to be in Swindon, where my friend is working. Imagine coming across the following road sign, and trying to sort out what it all means, as you sail by at 45 mph:



Take a close look at that sign - there are five mini-roundabouts within a mega-roundabout. And suddenly, you are faced with the real thing:



Note that the very inner part circulates in the opposite direction from the exterior. My friend avoids this area of town as much as possible in order to avoid encoutering this thing - but she was caught in it last weekend, and had to navigate the "Magic Roundabout," getting out of it at the first opportunity, and then regrouping (hopefully without being forced onto it again).

In the past she has had several bad experiences as a passenger in England - things like rearview mirrors flying through the window, sheared off doors and such, so I can cut her some slack on being nervous. Luckily, there are alternative tactics while in traffic structures like these, but I suspect these are not handed out in the literature car rental agencies supply:



So: are you a pro, or a tourist?

Here's a really great page showing GPS paths through the Magic Roundabout.

Chapulin colorado:

Another adventure in entomophagy for me. This time it was a conscious decision and not a mid-stride inhaling of a fly, or a mid-night swallowing of an errant spider.

I was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, last week (work, not play), and we went out to a restaurant called "El Arrayán," which had dishes from various regions of Mexico on the menu, prepared by a chef trained at a Swiss cooking school. So there were all sorts of shi-shi variations on the menu, but not so far from traditional that it could not be called Mexican.

One of the things on the menu were chapulines, or grasshoppers. Now I had seen these on various TV shows, and knew that they were eaten in Mexico, and I was in just the right mood to dare ordering them.

They were yummy. Let me rephrase that: THEY WERE YUMMY. Here are the requisite photos:

They were a lot smaller than I expected. The salsa was a avocado-poblano sauce with lime (quite yummy by itself). The best way to describe the taste is roasted black tea leaves.

I ate two of the little tacos, and my boss ate the other (and she greatly enjoyed it too). Out other dining companion dared to taste a single chapulin, and was gracious to say it was nice.

My son and my wife were completely grossed out by the photos, when I returned - I have to say that the photo of course only leaves you with that uneasy feeling you get when faced with an unfamiliar food. I couldn't tempt them with the smell and taste, which were very un-insectlike. When eating insects, one has to consider that they are very similar to shrimp. Still, whoever ate the first shrimp, lobster or grasshopper was brave, in any case. They are all ugleeee.

A little more on the restaurant - they have a website. Carmen, the owner, is a spunky little elf of a girl, who has taken on a tough business. The location and the decor are great - it reminded me very much of old houses in hot country in Colombia - thick, whitewashed adobe walls that are painted in color on their lower halves, narrow shuttered and barred windows overlooking the street. Plenty of old terra cotta tiles, and lots of hanging potted plants.

• El Arrayán
  
• Allende #344 Colonia El Cerro
  
• +52 (322) 222 71 95
  
• info@elarrayan.com.mx

The interior was also decorated with some amazing Huichol art - brightly colored yarn is laid down into beeswax-coated wood in intricate patterns that are said to have their origins in peyote-indiced visions. The set displayed in the restaurant are Carmen's inheritance from her grandmother, and are in amazing condition after having been in storage in Mexico DF for over 25 years. Here's one of them:

Another Crescent City:

This beautiful image by Stephen S. Young of Salem State is of the Mississippi delta area. Much of it has been changed by Katrina. The outer barrier islands have been altered tremendously, and of course the city of New Orleans, visible as the grey area between the river and the dark waters of Lake Pontchartrain, would show up differently since it is full of water now.

This image shows quite clearly that the levees stopped the deposition of sediments in the proximal distributary area, and allowed them to drop out only at the far end of the river - the crows foot extending ever-further into the Gulf. That, of course, was one of the ingredients in the disaster - river deltas depend on an equilibrium between the sinking sediments and the yearly piling on by floods to maintain a constant height above sea-level. As soon as you stop delivering sediment, the surface will slowly start to drop, and you will eventually be below sea-level, and you will have to start building dykes, or levees.

I am in Mexico this week, in the town of Puerto Vallarta. A much smaller version, but many of the same ingredients - the shore is built on a set of sandy dunes that buffer the wetlands behind from many of the storms that weep in off the Pacific. The river deposits sediments in the wetlands, and the sea delivers sand to the dunes, and there was a slow dance back and forth as the shoreline moved back and forth over thousands of years. Until modern man, that is.

With the construction of spillways to control the meandering of the river, sediments are no longer delivered to the wetlands, and they are slowly sinking. Large housing developments are being put into these wetland areas, replacing the farms. With the construction of beach front resorts and sea walls, beach erosion results. The end result: a large storm will eventually come through here, and there will be no beach dunes to stop the storm surge from flooding the housing developments.

Mexico does have environmental laws that prohibit exactly this kind of situation. But the Federal laws have very little weight here, where the Mayor and the town's workers are interested in the money injected into the local economy by real estate development on the shore and in the wetlands. As always, it is the social context that makes it a very complicated situation - the environmental economic costs of this pattern of development are not expressed in any tangible way, and won't be until disaster strikes.

All Katrina, all the time:

One item I have not heard yet on the news.

The insurance industry is caught in an interesting situation. They are well aware that one of the largest consequences of climate change is an increased frequency of more intense storms. This has a very direct consequence for their projected losses in any given season. Most of them have realized that their actuarial models based on historical storm frequencies are not the state-of-the-art anymore, and they have spent a great deal of money on computer models that match storm predictions to real estate and infrastructure inventories in order to understand what the consequences of a storm season might be.

However, the law constrains them to base their premium rates on historical records. They will therefore always be behind the curve, and they know that there will be little goodwill from a public that perceives them with suspicion. After all, who has the money to put up the largest building in just about every city?

$25 billion of damage and counting.

An interesting simulation of flooding done by NASA using Shuttle Radar Topography data: Quicktime, 6Mb. Current flooding is between the 3 and 4 meter marks.

Jumpy little fella:

Back in April I posted a note about the preparation for the Shuttle launch, and how two WB-57 chase planes were being modified to do HDTV footage of the launch. Here is the HDTV turret assembly mounted on the WB:



Here is the video from the STS-114 WAVE mission (WMV format). You be the judge - did it turn out well? Can you see why the NASA PR office has not used this as I thought they might?

Here is a photo taken with a hand-held camera from the cockpit of the WB-57 taken during a launch (not STS-114). You can barely see the plume from the SRBs (click on the image to get a much larger version, 1200x1600) :

Nice day for a touch of cocolitzli, eh?:

At a recent meeting about drilling to look at long-term records of climate change, one of the participants brought up Bill Ruddiman's theory about the onset of recent climate change, and that made me think of some interesting connections.

Bill observed that CO2 and methane in the atmosphere regularly follow cycles that are driven by orbital changes, but that in the recent past, they deviated, rising in concentration when they should have fallen. The CO2 begins to rise about 8,000 years ago, and methane begins to rise about 5,000 years ago (New Scientist article, graphs). That is a lot sooner than can be attributed to industrialization (post 1700's), and Bill proposed that this was due to a major change in the land cover - the rise of human agriculture and the removal of forests.

A piece of this article also deals with the "Little Ice Age," a period during the Middle Ages when temperatures were lower than normal, and the winters were particularly hard in Europe. Rather than having the Little Ice Age exacerbate the effects of the Black Plague as is usually taught, Bill turned this on its head, and wondered whether in fact the arrival of the plague that killed off about 50% of the human population meant that all that land that went fallow in fact began absorbing CO2 as the forests regrew, and that this drop in CO2 caused the low temperatures.

So I immediately began to wonder whether in fact this was linked to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, and the great changes in population that occurred here with the spread of disease. In Mexico, probably the most populous and highly organized society, the outbreaks of cocolitzli in 1545 wiped out about 90% of the population, and the 1576 episode then wiped out 50% of those remaining. This had to have had a large effect on the amount of land under agriculture, and thereby on the land cover.

I then went forward in time, and wondered if the cure for all this global warming that is going on would be a pandemic of H5N1 avian flu. If the published survival rate of 45% for this strain is combined with a global outbreak, it would have an enormous impact on humans, and therefore on land cover, and from there, on climate. (Avian flu timeline)

Mind you, there was a fair bit of criticism of the idea of the plague causing the LIA in the paleoclimate community. For one, when we look at marine records preserving many hundreds of thousands of years of sediments, there are fairly regular millenial cycles in the sediments that are probably caused by variations in temperature. Bill's theory does not explain this cyclicity - no evidence has been found for a parallel cyclicity for land cover, much less disease.

Could it happen this time? Of course. Is disease among humans what caused the Little Ice Age? Not clear. Is disease among humans and animals what usually causes these changes in climate? Probably not.

OS XS:

OK, I admit it, it was just a bit of "can it be done?"

There's a bit of a cheat here - the NeXT and its embedded emulations are not actually running at the same time as the OSX and the WinXP, but I thought it would look interesting. Now to get some BeOS and other X-flavor screen shots in there as well...

Falcon web-cam:

I spotted this little fellow today on the Panama Canal web-cam at the Miraflores Locks.


Peregrine web-cam! 

Looks like a peregrine falcon to me...

I happened to spot it by using the SlothCam widget on my desktop, which cycles through a set of web-cams. The list supplied by default with the widget and on the website is pretty limited - I would like to eventually find a better set...

Down:

Discovery is puffing away on the runway out at Edwards AFB.

Here's a shot of the shuttle aproaching through an infra-red spotting scope:

From the brightness in the image, you can clearly see that the nose bears the brunt of the re-entry heating.

Good thing they didn't have to go to the White Sands landing strip - the gypsum out there really gummed up the brakes on STS-3 in 1982, the last time that site was used.

It will of course have to be flown back to Florida aboard the specially modified 747, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA, shown here being mated with the Shuttle at White Sands after the STS-3 mission:

Columbia being mated to the SCA (NASA photo) 

and yes, those are American Airlines' colors - not sure why they are still on there, but I remember hearing this from the pilot's son, Doug Trott, with whom I went to school in the late 1970's.

- posted using a Widget!