jims musings

For many years, physi­cists have been mys­ti­fied by the Neu­trino, a sub­atomic par­ti­cle. Our sun gen­er­ates heaps of them: 6.5 × 10¹⁰ neu­tri­nos per sec­ond per square cen­time­ter of the earth. In other words, ‘lots and lots’.
The funny thing about neu­tri­nos, though, is that they’re hard to see. They move fast– about the speed of light– and rarely inter­act with any­thing. Most of the neu­tri­nos from the sun pass right through the earth. More mys­te­ri­ously, physi­cists have only been able to mea­sure less than half the expected num­ber of neu­tri­nos from the sun. Some­thing doesn’t add up.
Physi­cists at Stan­ford and Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ties recently dis­cov­ered some­thing unusual: decay rates of radioac­tive mate­ri­als appear to be linked to the neu­trino flux. Decay rates increased when the earth was close to the sun and decreased when the earth was far­ther away.
This has tremen­dous con­se­quences.
First, we’ve assumed (since Ruther­ford fig­ured out radioac­tive half-life) that decay rates are con­stant. We’ve based a huge amount of sci­en­tific knowl­edge on this assump­tion. Radio­met­ric dat­ing is impor­tant for arche­ol­ogy, geol­ogy and other phys­i­cal sci­ences. Our under­stand­ing of nuclear physics– reac­tors and weapons– is also based on these assump­tions. If this link with neu­trino flux is true, then a large enough burst of neu­tri­nos from the sun could det­o­nate all the reac­tors and nuclear weapons on the planet. (Admit­tedly, this is a very remote pos­si­bil­ity.)
The core of the earth is very hot– around 9,800 °F. Some of this heat comes from the decay of radioac­tive mate­ri­als. Spec­u­la­tion: Increased neu­trino flux could increase this tem­per­a­ture and be respon­si­ble for increased vol­canic activ­ity. We know that the earth has expe­ri­enced such peri­ods. Could the sun have ‘neu­trino cycles’ like its ‘sunspot cycles’?
Stay tuned. Fur­ther sci­en­tific under­stand­ing on this topic could turn into a Nobel prize.

I like pho­tog­ra­phy, and I’ve been using a Nikon LS-5000 scan­ner to bring my old slides and neg­a­tives into the dig­i­tal world.
Nikon, on the other hand, hasn’t been coop­er­at­ing. I’ve been using 64-bit Win­dows 7 for, wow, nearly a year now. No updates from Nikon for any­thing beyond 32-bit. Great scan­ners, Nikon, it would be nice if we could use them!
Any­how, I found a great site that tells how to get your favorite Nikon Scan­ner (LS-40, LS-50 and LS-5000) work­ing on 64-bit Win­dows.
http://axelriet.blogspot.com/2009/10/nikon-ls-40-ls-50-ls-5000-scanners-on.html

Did you know the future gets closer– every day!
By the end of 2009, around 4.6 bil­lion cell phones were in use– nearly 70% of the world pop­u­la­tion, and nearly the entire adult pop­u­la­tion. This is an amaz­ing sta­tis­tic! In prod­uct terms, cell phones rival food. Only oxy­gen and sun­light have a solid lead on cell phone use.
Cur­rently, most of these phones are pretty basic– phone calls only. This will change rapidly. Soon, more than half of cell phones will be internet-capable. They will have cam­eras, GPS receivers and all sorts of doo­dads. They will also be pro­gram­ma­ble, with thou­sands of down­load­able appli­ca­tions. These appli­ca­tions are the key to suc­cess of these bil­lions of mobile devices. They will cater to the myr­iad needs of mankind– whether it is help­ing a New Yorker find a great new place for lunch or a Niger­ian dry farmer plan his crop and coor­di­nate a plant­ing sched­ule with nearby farm­ers.
In terms of ‘sur­vival of the fittest’, these devices help make us ‘fit­ter’. Com­bin­ing sub­stan­tial com­pu­ta­tional power, inter­net access and the need of the moment, these devices allow us to respond more pow­er­fully to our momen­tary needs.
I fore­see not only GPS and cam­era ubiq­uity in these phones, but also barom­e­ters, ther­mome­ters, incli­nome­ters, and mag­ne­tome­ters. Pos­si­bly some sort of laser or sonar-based mea­sure­ment capa­bil­ity as well. Also, there will be built-in net­work­ing of sub­stan­tial sophis­ti­ca­tion. Phones will be able to ‘talk’ with one another, shar­ing user data, posi­tion infor­ma­tion and per­haps even using shared sig­nals. In many places, you will be able to use your phone like a remote con­trol– order­ing a soda from a vend­ing machine just by point­ing and click­ing (there’ll be an app for that). Also, data col­lected by these devices (baro­met­ric pres­sure, for exam­ple) will be sharable with the NOAA or other trusted orga­ni­za­tions.
There will be inter­est­ing social effects. Par­ents will be thought odd if their chil­dren do not have a cell phone. “How do you know if they’re okay?” will be the ques­tion. Gov­ern­ments every­where will seek the abil­ity to push and pull data from these devices. Emer­gency broad­casts and even ‘a direct line to the peo­ple’ will be the rea­son­ing. We may even see true democracy-style remote vot­ing tried in smaller pop­u­la­tions.
Get set, these phones are gonna be every­where.

Okay every­one… we’re well into the 21st Cen­tury. It’s time to fig­ure out how to store all that dig­i­tal media.
For most of you, this cur­rently means dig­i­tal pho­tos, but dig­i­tal media means all sorts of stuff, includ­ing audio, video and doc­u­ments. Let’s dis­cuss how to han­dle all this stuff.
Back in the day (the 20th Cen­tury), peo­ple would stuff their photo neg­a­tives into shoe­boxes and stuff the boxes into a closet. Slides– often in carousels– would live in the closet, too. Those ‘Super-8′ movies would also be stuffed in there, per­haps with a pro­jec­tor and screen. Doc­u­ments would live some­where else, usu­ally in a fil­ing cab­i­net or desk drawer. Music was stored else­where, usu­ally with the record player or stereo. Finally, video tapes or (gasp) laser discs would be kept near the TV or player.
In short, things were kept all over, and rarely orga­nized.
Now, with all this stuff con­verg­ing to the PC, it is crit­i­cal to keep it orga­nized. I per­son­ally have about 40,000 images using 280 GB of disk space. This amount of mate­r­ial must be orga­nized.
Thank­fully, the orga­ni­za­tion is sim­ple.
First, you must break out of the Win­dows ‘My Doc­u­ments’ or ‘My Pho­tos’ struc­ture.
On your hard disk, cre­ate a folder to hold your data. I’m a geek, so I named my folder ‘Data.’ You can call it ‘Per­sonal’ or even ‘Sally’ if you’re feel­ing friendly. The name doesn’t mat­ter, but the loca­tion does. It needs to be out­side of the ‘My Doc­u­ments’ struc­ture (so every­body who uses the com­puter can get to it) and easy to find.
Inside of the data folder, I have more fold­ers, each folder being named for a year, like this:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

Within each Year folder, I have more sub­fold­ers which rep­re­sent the dates and events that pic­tures were taken, like this:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
           +- 2009-04-05 Kindergarten play
           +- 2009-06-17 Yosemite Trip
           +- 2009-08-21 Disneyland
           +- 2009-09-03 Cousins Party
           +- 2009-11-26 Thanksgiving
           +- 2009-12-25 Christmas
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

You place your pho­tos and videos into these dated fold­ers. I actu­ally have an addi­tional level, since I have mul­ti­ple cam­eras. Under each dated folder, I have another folder for each cam­era involved, like so:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
           +- 2009-04-05 Kindergarten play
           +- 2009-06-17 Yosemite Trip
               +- Canon XSi
               +- Canon SD880
               +- Casio ZX-55
               +- Apple iPhone
               +- Processed
           +- 2009-08-21 Disneyland
           +- 2009-09-03 Cousins Party
           +- 2009-11-26 Thanksgiving
           +- 2009-12-25 Christmas
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

The final break­down may seem unneeded, but it helps keep things orga­nized. My cam­eras do auto­matic file nam­ing, and occa­sion­ally there are name col­li­sions (where the file names from dif­fer­ent cam­eras match). Keep­ing the pho­tos seper­ate pre­vents over­writ­ing pic­tures.
You’ll also noticed the ‘Processed’ folder. This is where I keep pho­tos that have been altered in some way– thus I always have the orig­i­nal.
Hope this helps every­body. This struc­ture keeps my pic­tures orga­nized, allows me to find things very quickly, and makes back­ups easy to do.

Recently saw Cameron’s Avatar.
The story is quite sim­ple and is right­fully com­pared to Dances with Wolves, but that is not why you see this film.
In a sen­tence, Cameron has turned film-making upside down. There is no longer any lim­i­ta­tion to telling a story, none. With this one (very expen­sive) film, Mr. Cameron has:

1. Single-handedly brought 3D film into the main­stream. Start­ing now, non-3D movies will be passe, like black and white.
2. Nearly oblit­er­ated the need for sets or even actors. Sure, cost will con­tinue to drive the use of phys­i­cal sets and breath­ing peo­ple, but their days are num­bered. In a decade, a high school senior will have access to sim­i­lar capa­bil­ity on his home PC, what­ever that looks like.
3. Won him­self another pile of oscars.

Pre­dic­tion: This film sets a new stan­dard for ‘the view­ing expe­ri­ence’ which will not be sur­passed until direct sen­sory input is cre­ated… giv­ing an Avatar expe­ri­ence to each moviegoer.

Solu­tions. We all want them. Here are some broad strokes to some prob­lems we face.

Health Care
I reject the idea of a “Health Care Cri­sis.” A cri­sis as such sim­ply doesn’t exist. Go to any hos­pi­tal, urgent care cen­ter or what have you, and you will receive the care you need. Nobody is turned away.
What we do have is a prob­lem of pay­ment, which is tied to our insur­ance, which is tied to our employ­ment. Note the two-step link­age; this is also a prob­lem.
Solu­tion:
1) Revoke, amend or repeal the fed­eral leg­is­la­tion which encour­ages receiv­ing health care through an employer. HIPAA only went a small way towards portable health insur­ance; we need to com­pletely decou­ple health care from employ­ers alto­gether. (Doing so would also reduce the over­head of run­ning a com­pany.) This prob­a­bly means los­ing the pre-tax excep­tion on health care pre­mi­ums, and it means peo­ple begin pay­ing the true cost of their health cov­er­age. This would be painful, but with a tran­si­tory period (say, 24 months) it would be doable.
2) Now that insur­ance is truly portable– like auto insur­ance– and costs are more trans­par­ent to the con­sumer, we can work on what insur­ance is for. Namely, health insur­ance is for emer­gen­cies. Heart attacks, can­cer, bro­ken bones and that sort of thing. Insur­ance com­pa­nies can also offer addi­tional plans for those will­ing to pay more. The point is, for the mil­lions of healthy peo­ple and fam­i­lies out there (whose demand is cur­rently hid­den by the ‘pools’ of employ­ees in com­pany insur­ance plans), plans with low pre­mi­ums and high deductibles will be offered. This is true insur­ance and dif­fers greatly from cur­rent plans, which are more akin to pre-paid med­ical care. Inter­est­ingly, plans like HSAs would prob­a­bly tran­si­tion quite well.
3) In no case is addi­tional fed­eral involve­ment needed, except per­haps to allow (under the Com­merce clause) insur­ance com­pa­nies to oper­a­tion across states. This leg­is­la­tion shouldn’t vary much from the fun­da­men­tal rules which gov­ern inter­state bank­ing.
4) Medicare and Med­ic­aid can be mod­estly expanded to cover basic pre­mi­ums for cit­i­zens who do not work, sim­i­lar to other gov­ern­ment plans which cover auto insur­ance.
There. We end up with a health care sys­tem which is avail­able to all with­out gov­ern­ment man­aged care (so-called ‘Death Panels’).

The Mid­dle East
If I were sud­denly made King of the United States, I would adopt a sim­ple plan for the mid­dle east. The plan is sim­ple, and one that we west­ern­ers are good at: igno­rance.
The prob­lem with the mid­dle east, you see, is oil. They have lots of it, and cur­rently we need it. We pay through the nose for it, too– not only at the gas pump, but in mil­i­tary involve­ment in silly places. These con­di­tions need to change, and the only way to do that is for the United States to become sov­er­eign in its energy needs.
Con­ser­va­tion is good, but doesn’t solve the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem: we sim­ply require unholy amounts of energy. There­fore, we must pro­duce more. More oil (gasp!) for the near-term (1–7 years). For the medium-term (7–30 years), we need nuclear power. We have about 100 nuke plants today. We should have 500. This would pro­duce cheap, clean energy for our entire nation– not to men­tion the con­struc­tion, engi­neer­ing and other ancil­lary jobs. You want an effec­tive ‘stim­u­lus’ bill? Take half that $787 Bil­lion and build nuclear plants.
Now, that we’re inde­pen­dent of the mid­dle east, we have a free hand to act in a man­ner that is mean­ing­ful to us and clear to the rest of the world. If we then choose to con­tinue sup­port­ing Israel, we can do so with­out fear of the oil weapon.
They can drink their oil. And, if they hap­pen to develop nuclear weapons, we can deal with that threat as a sov­er­eign nation, instead of as a depen­dent client state.
For the long term, we need to develop tech­nolo­gies which allow us to pre­serve our hydro­car­bon sup­plies, rather than burn­ing them. Oil is far too use­ful as a chem­i­cal feed­stock for us to be burn­ing it.
Per­haps one of these future tech­nolo­gies would be space-based solar power, but we need cheaper access to space for that to work.

The Envi­ron­ment
We’ve made some silly moves recently with regard to the envi­ron­ment, the most note­wor­thy of which is the politi­ciza­tion of ‘cli­mate change.’ This is not a venue for me to dis­cuss my views on this mat­ter, but I will say that changes such as this have occurred and will con­tinue to occur regard­less of what we do– I’m sure the Polar Bears will sur­vive.
I do fully agree that dump­ing bil­lions of tons of CO2 in our atmos­phere is a bad idea. Since much of this CO2 comes from burn­ing hydro­car­bons, shift­ing to a nuclear-centric power grid could only have good effects for our envi­ron­men­tal impact.
We should also con­sider National Oceanic Pre­serves– places where fish­ing is not allowed, and where marine life can find refuge for breed­ing and migra­tion. Ulti­mately, these areas will also help sup­port exist­ing fish­eries and species diversity.

Edu­ca­tion
The fed­eral gov­ern­ment should not be involved at all in pri­mary edu­ca­tion. Uni­ver­si­ties, as research insti­tu­tions, can very much use fed­eral dol­lars. Edu­ca­tional assis­tance pro­grams– Pell Grants, Stu­dent Loans and such, should be elim­i­nated. Yes, I know all about the costs of col­lege– and the pri­mary rea­son for these increas­ing costs is the avail­abil­ity of gov­ern­ment money. Think of the hous­ing bub­ble, but applied to class­room seats. The myth that every­one needs or deserves a world-class edu­ca­tion is a fan­tasy. At some point, if we con­tinue on our cur­rent course, the eco­nomic ben­e­fit of a col­lege degree will be out­weighed by the debt of acquir­ing such. What will hap­pen then?
Best to get out now and let the bub­ble deflate.

National Debt
This is the Mother of All Prob­lems. Our debt load lim­its our flex­i­bil­ity and saps future capa­bil­ity. My per­sonal incli­na­tion, if I were King, would be to fol­low the path of cut­ting busi­ness reg­u­la­tion (see the Health Care com­ments above) and elim­i­nat­ing most cor­po­rate income taxes. For cit­i­zens below a cer­tain income level, mort­gage pay­ments and per­haps even rent pay­ments would be entirely tax deducible.
Cor­po­ra­tions which pro­vide funds to sup­port National Parks, Pre­serves and other such spaces would be allowed cer­tain exemp­tions in their oper­a­tions. (This would be extended to cor­po­ra­tions like Google, which uses tremen­dous amounts of elec­tric­ity.) In short, I would do every­thing pos­si­ble to encour­age long-term eco­nomic growth. Short term ‘solu­tions’, like rais­ing taxes, only dam­age long-term growth trends and make the debt more dif­fi­cult to pay off.
Pay­ing off the debt would increase the strength and buy­ing power of the dol­lar. As this occurs, I would require a gen­eral import tar­iff– per­haps 5–10%- to hold ultra-cheap goods at bay. My goal is not pro­tec­tion­ism, but to level the play­ing field so US man­u­fac­tur­ers have a com­pet­i­tive chance.

That’s the short story, ladies and gentlemen.

(Bonus points if you can name the film.)

I came across this inter­est­ing info­graphic today:

(Click here for the orig­i­nal post)


Now, I have minor gripes with the assump­tions made by the author, fore­most of which is cost.

What is the cost asso­ci­ated with pro­duc­ing enough solar pan­els to cover Spain with 20% effi­cient solar pan­els?
The cost asso­ci­ated with solar pan­els varies widely– effi­ciency, mate­ri­als, trans­mis­sion and stor­age issues are all involved. Let’s assume we’ve got­ten an astound­ing deal at 2$/watt. Lets also merely look at what is needed for cur­rent energy demand.
The author quotes “500 quadrillion Btu” as cur­rent demand. Con­vert­ing this to KW/h [1 Btu = .0002931 KW/h (kilo­watt hours)] equals 146,550,000,000,000 KW/h, or 146.5 quadrillion watts. This is total annual gen­er­a­tion; daily gen­er­a­tion is some­what more than 400 tril­lion watts.

At 2$ per watt, we’re talk­ing a measly 800 tril­lion dol­lars. 2008’s total global econ­omy weighed in around $70 Tril­lion, so if we ded­i­cated 10% of the global eco­nomic out­put to buy­ing and installing solar pan­els, we’d be able to pay for those solar pan­els in around 100 years.


Yeah.


A small sug­ges­tion: let’s start think­ing about solu­tions that work.


In another vein, if this rel­a­tively tiny area is capa­ble of pow­er­ing the planet, con­sider the total energy the Earth receives from the sun each day. Do we really think that reduc­ing CO2 con­cen­tra­tions in the atmos­phere (at enor­mous cost) from 0.0384% to 0.0284% is going to have any real impact? The solar vari­ance is greater than the heat-retentive capa­bil­i­ties of CO2.

So, some months ago I move away from Win­dowsXP to 64-bit Ubuntu Linux, ver­sion 8.10. I liked it, lots.
Turns out, the rest of my fam­ily liked it… not so much.
What I liked:
Gen­er­ally faster sys­tem. Mem­ory and CPU used more effec­tively. All 4GB of mem­ory used, as opposed to only 3GB under XP.
The abil­ity to keep Win­dows in a VM through Vir­tu­al­Box, but have the Win­dows win­dows mix and min­gle with the native Gnome win­dows. Cool.
More flex­i­ble UI. Com­piz rocks.
Bet­ter secu­rity. I was able to man­age secu­rity for all users in a gen­er­ally bet­ter way.
More appli­ca­tions for what­ever I needed than I could shake a stick at. This came in really handy dur­ing those times when I needed to be a com­puter wiz­ard. The Win­dows ecosys­tem is just a small shadow of what exists out there in Linux Land.
Issues:
Kids games gen­er­ally didn’t work. (DirectX prob­lems, even with lat­est ver­sion of Wine).
My spe­cial photo-manipulation soft­ware (DxO Optics) likes to use GPU accel­er­a­tion, which wasn’t avail­able through Wine or Vir­tu­al­Box.
Some of the fancy beta-version stuff I had installed (try­ing to fix above issues) broke the otherwise-excellent sys­tem updat­ing tools. My fault, but I couldn’t revert with­out break­ing other things. A rock and a hard place sit­u­a­tion, and I didn’t want to go man­ual with sys­tem updates.
My fancy Canon Pixma printer didn’t print color. All I could ever get was the black level. I blew a lot of black ink try­ing to fix this. Worked fine from vir­tual win­dows. (My new HP Laser­Jet P2055dn worked great, though.)

So.. look­ing around for a solu­tion, I’ve decided to take a giant leap. I’ve installed Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate 64-bit, build 7057.
The ver­dict? I’m pleased. Bet­ter than Vista. Faster. Bet­ter secu­rity. Gen­er­ally smarter than Vista and XP, too. All my stuff worked out of the box, except the soft­ware for my LS5000, and I think that is merely a bug in the beta OS of Win­dows 7.
Now… if I could only find a nice 30″ mon­i­tor with LED backlighting.…

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, the planet has moved into a post-industrial world. This does not mean that indus­try is no longer impor­tant; rather, indus­try is no longer the pri­mary finan­cial dri­ver for most economies.
Indus­try, by the way, is the energy-intensive act of cre­at­ing a fin­ished prod­uct from raw mate­ri­als. Thus the cre­ation of planes, cars, houses, shoes and dish­wash­ers can be con­sid­ered indus­try.
On the other hand, infor­ma­tion is rapidly becom­ing a pri­mary prod­uct. Soft­ware is what man­ages infor­ma­tion. And soft­ware is being included in increas­ingly many things. In fact, it is the com­put­er­i­za­tion of so many pre­vi­ously ‘dumb’ items that has increased their util­ity and value.
Take cars. With the addi­tion of some sim­ple sen­sors and a com­puter, their effi­ciency vastly improves. Add some motion sen­sors, explo­sives, a kevlar bag and a com­puter and you have airbags which save lives. It is the com­puter that keeps the sys­tem from killing peo­ple.
Smart wash­ing machines now exam­ine the out­go­ing water to deter­mine when clothes are clean, improv­ing clean­li­ness and sav­ing water.
Installing a $100 pro­gram­ma­ble ther­mo­stat in a home can save hun­dreds of dol­lars a year in energy.
Our post-industrial age offers many improve­ments on pre­vi­ous items… new twists on the old to make daily life bet­ter. Look at mobile phones! Impos­si­ble with­out com­put­ers.
At some point, we’re going to start improv­ing the human body. We already have, in a way: arti­fi­cial joints. Breast implants. Pace­mak­ers, defib­ril­la­tors and cochlear implants. Soon we’ll have arti­fi­cial hearts and syn­thetic blood. Not very far off are replace­ments for the pan­creas, kid­neys and per­haps the liver.
Are these devices going to be acces­si­ble on-line? I can imag­ine some­body hack­ing into some busi­ness leader’s med­ical implant and doing nefar­i­ous deeds. (Inter­est­ing idea for a book, by the way…)
Where is the line? Is there a line, demar­cat­ing ‘okay’ and ‘to far’? Would it be good to have arti­fi­cial eyes, to rid the world of blind­ness? They’re com­ing! How about if that bionic eye allowed the user to see ultra­vi­o­let and infrared? How about radio waves or x-rays? How about a zoom capa­bil­ity? Heck, why don’t we throw in a video cam­era!
Tak­ing it fur­ther, why don’t we equip the police with these things? They get great vision, and the pub­lic gets a video record of every­thing the offi­cer does– just like the car-mounted cam­eras, but bet­ter!
How about an implanted mobile phone? You just think about talk­ing to some­one, and it’s done! It would be like telepa­thy. (Wow, talk about voices in your head, though.)
Arthur C. Clarke wrote about a future world in which every­one had a skull­cap– really a computer/brain inter­face. One side effect was that any­one with crim­i­nal intent was eas­ily detectable. Oth­ers with psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems were quickly removed from the pri­mary pop­u­la­tion and ‘fixed’ if pos­si­ble.
So, again… how far is to far?

So Microsoft, bless their hard-working lit­tle hearts, has devel­oped an inter­est­ing tool which digests pho­tographs of the same sub­ject and presents them in a pseudo-3D space. Con­trols are pro­vided so you can click around and ‘visit’ the sub­ject.
Its very cool, and its called Pho­to­synth.
I bring it up, because A) its flat-out cool, and B) I think this (or some­thing like it) will even­tu­ally enable a type of vir­tual tourism and per­haps even edu­ca­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties. Want to visit the inside of Tutankhamen’s tomb? How about the Lou­vre? Or maybe you just want to show your best friend the liv­ing room you just redec­o­rated.
Even­tu­ally, I’d like to see HD video incor­po­rated into this tool. Give me a 3D mon­i­tor or gog­gles, and I could have a great time.
Any­ways, I’ve made my first pho­to­synth from some old pic­tures I just scanned. Go check it out.