Random Fate » Geek Cool

For certain members of the geek crowd, this is too funny

Jack Grant — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:52:41 +0000

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AT&T, Google Voice, and the FCC – reconciling public good and private enterprise isn’t easy

Jack Grant — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:49:14 +0000

I ran across an interesting article about AT&T and Google Voice. I received an invitation to use Google Voice, and I find it very useful. It rings several phones when my Google Voice phone number is called, allowing me to give that number to a select few whom I want to be able to contact me anywhere.

The article covers a dispute between AT&T and Google, and in involves the FCC. Regulation of the phone system isn’t straightforward in reconciling public good with private enterprise.

Here is the opening of the article, but I recommend reading the entire thing:

AT&T vs. Google Voice: Sex, money, the feds, and your phone bill

Sam Gustin
Oct 9th 2009 at 2:50PM

Despite what a handful of lawmakers may say, the dispute between Google (GOOG) and AT&T (T) over the search giant’s Google Voice application is not so much about fairness or rural access as it is about steamy phone sex and piles of money. These lawmakers, including Steve Buyer, an Indiana Republican and John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican — who have received a combined $200,000 from AT&T and Verizon over their careers, according to Opensecrets.org — have written to the FCC complaining that Google’s refusal to connect expensive rural calls is “ill conceived and unfair to our rural constituents.”

The FCC is set to open an investigation to determine if that’s true, according to Dow Jones, and will formally notify Google of the inquest later Friday. But why all the interest in Google Voice from AT&T, Congress and now the FCC? After all, Google Voice is available by invite only, and only a relative handful of people are using it. So why is everyone in such a lather about it? And why is AT&T expending so much energy to create roadblocks to its tiny new rival?

Technically, the dispute is over FCC regulations governing how long-distance and local phone companies pay each other for traffic that passes from national to local networks. Since Congress deregulated the telecommunications industry in 1996, much of this traffic comprises extremely lucrative sex chat lines, which the national carriers wind up paying for. AT&T has never been happy about that, and it’s now livid that Google Voice can avoid having to connect such calls — thus dodging this twisted fee scheme.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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The plasma knife – not a lightsabre, but a surgical tool

Jack Grant — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:35:00 +0000

In addition to being cool, this technology will help save lives in a difficult situation:

U.S. Special Operations testing plasma knife in the field
By Andrew Nusca | Oct 16, 2009 |

The U.S. Special Operations Command is field-testing a plasma knife to help medics in the field save more soldiers’ lives.

The plasma knife is intended to be used as a surgical tool that’s safer but as effective as a traditional steel scalpel. The knife’s blade is made of heated, ionized gas that can both incise and cauterize wounded flesh, protecting against infection and stopping bleeding.

That’s an important advancement for troops that find themselves in remote areas without medical help in the area.

The article includes a diagram from a patent on the technology, which is also very interesting.

It’s nice to see technology oriented towards saving lives.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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Beautiful microscopic photos become art

Jack Grant — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:25:36 +0000

From one of the weblogs at The New York Times:

Showcase: In Microscopic Realm, Science Reveals Art

One of the photos is from my area of work, a pattern formed by shrinkage of photoresist, used in making integrated circuits. There were many beautiful patterns I saw in microscopes during my time doing research and development. There are times I miss those hours of looking through microscope objectives or staring at the CRT of a secondary electron microscope.

There is beauty everywhere, but we must choose to see it, to recognize it.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice .

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114 isn’t a magic number after all

Jack Grant — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:51:30 +0000

Physicists have produced element 114, which was thought might be relatively stable among the super-heavy elements, but it turns out that it was not.

On to 120…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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More whimsy in space

Jack Grant — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:23:01 +0000

I know I just posted about some whimsy associated with space, but you know, we need more of this:

Out of this world: British teddy bears strapped to helium weather balloon reach the edge of space

It may sound silly or inconsequential, but as someone I once knew said to me, “It’s the small things, Jack, the small things add up to a lot more than the big things in the end.”

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Buzz Lightyear returns to Earth after 15 months in space

Jack Grant — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:35:25 +0000

From the NASA Image of the Day gallery:

The Return of Buzz Lightyear

Disney’s space ranger Buzz Lightyear returned from space on Sept. 11, aboard space shuttle Discovery’s STS-128 mission after 15 months aboard the International Space Station. His time on the orbiting laboratory will celebrated in a ticker-tape parade together with his space station crewmates and former Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin on Oct. 2, at Walt Disney World in Florida.

While on the space station, Buzz supported NASA’s education outreach program– STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)–by creating a series of fun educational online outreach programs. Following his return, Disney is partnering with NASA to create a new online educational game and an online mission patch competition for school kids across America. NASA will fly the winning patch in space. In addition, NASA plans to announce on Oct. 2, 2009, the details of a new exciting educational competition that will give students the opportunity to design an experiment for the astronauts on the space station.

It’s nice to see a bit of photographic whimsy in these troubled times.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Science, the press, and politics – Can even experimentally verified facts be reported correctly with context? It appears not…

Jack Grant — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:17:37 +0000

People who read “hard sci-fi” or who paid attention in their basic Physics class (assuming they were even required to take one, sigh…) are aware of the concept of magentic monopoles. If they exist, they would be similar in behavior to the proton and electron, the electric monopoles for positive and negative charge respectively. In other words, there would be a “north pole” particle and “south pole” particle if one used the strict definition of “monopole” that has been used for electric charge. There is a set of remarkably elegant mathematical formulas, named the Maxwell Equations, that describe the interaction of electromagnetic fields and electric monopoles. These equations do not account for the existence of magnetic monopoles, because the data existing at the time of their formulation indicated that magnetic monopoles did not exist, and there has been no replicated experiment to indicate that this data was incorrect or the equations are flawed. When I was in graduate school studying Physics, on the final exam for my class in Electrodynamics I was required to re-derive the Maxwell equations assuming that magnetic monopoles did indeed exist. The form of the equations changed significantly, and I had to explain how observed phenomena would be different if the equations I had just derived were the actual description of the behaviors of interaction rather than the classic Maxwell Equations.

After this long preamble explaining how and why I know what I am talking about on this subject, if anyone is still reading, I have to express my objection to the headline of the following article:

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

I won’t go into the details, because they are very abstruse, but my rationale for my objection is that the “magnetic monopoles” described in the article are not in any way related to the magnetic monopoles that would exist if there was indeed symmetry between electric and magnetic interactions.

The entire context is lost. The “Dirac strings” described in the article are not related to classic magnetic monopoles in the way that the article and headline imply.

In other words, I am complaining about how the press, even the scientifically oriented press such as Science Daily, can’t seem to report and describe the context of any issue, whether scientific or political.

Sigh…

I wonder at times, how have we even survived to this point, until the cynical side of me that I try to combat kicks in and tells me it is because the vast majority are indifferent at best and just go along.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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The NASA Earth Observing System satellite looks at California wildfires

Jack Grant — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:29:09 +0000

The view of the smoke from the Station Fire in California from a NASA satellite:

Smoke from Station Fire Blankets Southern California

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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A concise illustration of how I help people with computer problems

Jack Grant — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:27:43 +0000

From the webcomic xkcd, which is an entertaining read, the Tech Support Cheat Sheet.

It hits the nail squarely on the head…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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NASA image of the day: Cat’s Eye Nebula

Jack Grant — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:21:02 +0000

Another beautiful image of the day from NASA, combining data from two different space-based telescopes.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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A full-disk photo of the Earth

Jack Grant — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:18:33 +0000

NASA has posted the first infrared image taken with the newest weather satellite, and it is amazing. Hurricane Bill is visible in the full disk view of the Earth, and the photo shows how huge these storms are.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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Finding humor in serious work

Jack Grant — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:08:15 +0000

Studying how zombies might take over the world sounds like something for The Journal of Irreproducible Results, but it’s really serious science:

Science ponders zombie attack

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Not all rockets have to be huge to do engineering work

Jack Grant — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:14:41 +0000

The Image of the Day from NASA today is the launch of a rocket that carries a payload to test an inflatable re-entry system. Note the light pole and picnic table on the lower right of the picture, showing the scale of the rocket.

Looks like it could have been launched from a freeway rest area.

Not every space-related engineering test has to involve rockets tens of stories tall…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Monitor madness

Jack Grant — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:59:12 +0000

I’m an information junkie. I have a computer dedicated to running various Yahoo Widgets displaying weather radar maps (national and local), the local five-day weather forecast, a mini world map showing where the sun is shining, a Gmail checker, a network monitor, a system monitor, my instant messenger application (Digsby), a scrolling RSS feed (Snackr), TweetDeck, a Google Voice window, Skype, and µTorrent. This is all running on a 22″ widescreen monitor. I’ve run out of room on it, and I think I need another monitor to fit it all in.

And this is just for displaying information, not playing games like on my main computer.

Yikes…

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Forty years ago today Apollo 11 was launched sending men to the Moon

Jack Grant — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:35:45 +0000

One of my earliest memories is seeing this on television:

Which happened four days after the launch on July 16, 1969. Forty years ago today we launched Apollo 11 to land men on the Moon.

In commemoration of the event, there is a website called We Choose the Moon that is playing back audio of the radio transmissions during the mission in real time. (Warning, the site is very Flash intensive, to load it requires a lot of bandwidth, and systems with slow processors or lacking RAM may choke on it)

Amazing, what humanity can accomplish when we try.

Equally amazing, what we forget we can do if we are serious, dedicated, and professional.

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NASA is restoring footage of the mission after finding the original tapes which had been misplaced for years. Here is one of their test videos:

Here is a video that doesn’t highlight the restored footage of the first step, but gives a sense of what it felt like. Look for the reaction of news anchor Walter Cronkite.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice .

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A requiem for CompuServe

Jack Grant — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:43:22 +0000

It’s a few days late, but I don’t recall seeing much comment on this milestone: CompuServe has been shut down by AOL, the current owner of the name and whatever was left of the company.

To enlighten those younger than their forties, CompuServe was one of the first online services, back in the dark ages before the Internet (which was indeed capitalized in the early days…) and the World Wide Web (again, capitalized before becoming ubiquitous), starting 30 years ago in 1979 to be exact, over dial up, which involved hogging a telephone line (no cell phones, only the house land line) and slow connection speeds. You were hot stuff if you could get above 10k bits (not bytes, bits) per second. No streaming video here, even simple text like email took minutes to download if you had more than a few messages.

It is difficult to describe the feelings evoked in those early days, when connecting to a server in Switzerland was a cause for excitement and being able to run a Gopher search was the best way to find documents over the nascent Internet.

Thirty years… and then gone…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice .

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Learned and eventually forgotten

Jack Grant — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:23:37 +0000

Many amazing things were accomplished in the days before computers became ubiquitous and the world wide web became a distraction as well as a tool.

Nazi Germany built the first jet fighter in the world, and was in the process of building a plane that bears a remarkable resemblance to the modern B2 bomber (although I think the stealth aspects of the “Hilter’s Stealth-Fighter” were an accidental byproduct and not the result of considered design). There was no computer modeling available to examine the airflow around the plane, which had no vertical control or stabilization surfaces, yet the plane flew.

The computer in the Apollo 11 capsule Columbia used to navigate to the moon for the first lunar landing, which occurred 50 years ago this July 16, wasn’t as powerful as the engine control unit in your car that moderates the electronic fuel injection and variable valve timing. Yet they made it to the moon, while we use sophisticated GPS systems to travel much shorter distances.

What prompted my thoughts on these amazing accomplishments is the discovery of a web site called The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, which has photos of many of the drawing instruments undoubtedly used to make the precision plans needed to build the plane or the space capsule. The comments below many of the images are very entertaining, and emphasize how much things have changed.

A lifetime ago, in high school, I took a mechanical drawing course, and again when I was in college. I still have my old drawing instruments.

Now, those skills I developed and techniques I learned are almost useless. Wow, things have changed…

I need to dig up my old slide rules and take some pictures of them, maybe along with some of my film SLR cameras.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Don’t bring stakes and garlic to a zombie fight

Jack Grant — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:58:30 +0000

From a discussion at work today:

“Dude, this is a zombie project, it won’t die and it eats our brains.”

“I know… I’ve gotten out the garlic and stakes to kill it and I’m getting nowhere.”

“Well that’s why, you don’t use garlic and stakes on zombies, that’s for vampires. You use flamethrowers and chainsaws for zombies. You’ve got to use the right tools for the job…”

We’re too geeky to live sometimes…

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The first nerd President

Jack Grant — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:05:00 +0000

It’s almost 15 minutes long, but it’s very funny. John Hodgman, the “PC” in the “Hi, I’m a Mac… And I’m a PC” commercials speaks at the Radio and Television Correspondent’s Dinner:

President Obama flashes the Vulcan salute twice, so he really is our first nerd President.

Cool…

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Thanks to TrekMovie.com for the link to the video.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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