Saturday, August 10, 2002

And a few links to some amazing images from NASA The Earth at night -- a montage of images from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The lights map out the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated areas. The US interstate highway system is clearly visible as is the Trans-Siberian RR. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/earth_lights_lrg.jpg More amazing photos are available on NASA's Blue Marble page. http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11605 The atmosphere is clearly visible in the 2048 resoluion view. 8:46:55 AM     Are smokers killing their pets? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/020730075305.htm If they won't stop for themselves or their spouses and kids, will they stop for their cat? People are generally bad at assessing risk or calculating probabilities, but are very good at pattern recognition. Are we hard-wired to over react to coincidence? A nice piece on the subject appeared in the New York Times magazine section. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html?8hpist Janis Ian has written two interesting articles on the state of networked music from the eyes of a small performer. http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html Highly recommended reading and most of it corresponds to my experiences over the past few years - particularly her points on why people buy music. She concludes her second piece with a pithy note about congresspeople. Here is a quick project for those of you with a shortwave radio. There are several time standards that transmit on the same frequency. If can hear both signals (one will generally be much weaker than the other) you can record them on your computer and look for the time difference in the tone bursts. By using the difference in distances between you and the two stations, it is easy to get a figure to within 1% of the accepted figure. There are many sources of error and I leave it to the hobbiest to see if they can derive a robust error measurement. MTI has announced some real progress in their work on a small commercial fuel cell - one that burns methane rather than pure hydrogen. The current cell is still very impractical, but one day we may have something much better than conventional batteries (or not - there are some real challenges) http://www.mtimicrofuelcells.com/article.cfm?a_id=4065 One wonders what would happen in the next election if Ashcroft were to jail a few hundred kids for music piracy. Would such an effort be sufficient to get the sub 25 year old set to the polls (and voting anti Republican)? My guess is that it wouldn't, but it could be social dynamite. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=581&e=2&cid=581&u=/nm/20020809/tc_nm/tech_copyright_dc_4 And finally, a bit of visual delight. The editors of Yahoo pick some interesting images. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=index2&cid=441 6:11:44 AM

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