Sunday, September 15, 2002

Chimera has become my preferred browser with the 0.5 release. Fast and beautiful aquafied renders, tabs and it isn't Explorer. There are still bugs, but I'm using it 95% of the time at this point. Development and bug fixes are occurring at a fast pace at this point. http://chimera.mozdev.org/ The source is there, so if there are features you really need, write it and compile. 2:52:03 AM     How about subscribing to email from a goose? Adopt a goose and follow what may be a very impressive migration route. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2216858.stm Alas poor Kerry. After making a 7000+km migration from Northern Ireland to the Canadian Arctic via via Iceland and Greenland, poor Kerry ended up in an Eskimo's refrigerator. Eons ago, when the web was still young and free of popup ads, I helped put together a goose migration project for school children. The idea was that they would receive tracking information from radio tagged geese in the North American flyway. Kids would track a specific goose and compare the path to others. The thing we didn't plan for was the high mortality rate of geese (some of natural causes, but mostly ground to air artillery) and how kids deal with the fact that Becky to goose (all of the kids named the geese) is gone and probably on someone's dinner table. If kids had any first hand knowledge of where meat comes from we would probably have a much larger vegetarian population. A few years ago a school teacher in the UK was terminated for showing twelve year olds a video from a cattle slaughter house.... 2:51:41 AM     Two cycle engines are incredibly polluting (an oft-quoted statistic is that operating a snowmobile for seven hours produces a similar amount of pollution as driving the average family car for 100,000 miles - barring CO2 emissions of course). It is amazing that the Bush administration has finally acted on rules for this class of engine as well as certain diesels. The rules aren't as tough as they should be and the phase in glacial, but it is a very important step in the right direction. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/politics/14EMIT.html This will be most offensive in the West, but these are strong Bush voters who will not change to the other party based on this. Some of them will grumble, but that is about it. It also gives the Republicans an environmental sound bite while avoiding the deep and profound issues associated with pollution. 2:51:20 AM     Cable TV is very interesting business. Essentially a semi-regulated monopoly, it is beginning to receive a major challenge from satellite providers. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/technology/circuits/12SATE.html As a member of my township's (suburban New Jersey) cable tv committee for nearly two years, I have been astonished at the arrogance of the local provider. An unwillingness to provide good value to many of its consumers has resulted in a major shift to satellite providers. Two informal counts now show over twenty percent of the residents using satellite cable fueled by poor performance of the cable system, increasing bills and programming (mostly sports) issues. At one time I believed the major asset of the cable company was their broadband connection, but our surveys indicate that most of the town's residents lack an interest in cable modems. At last count about 15 percent had a broadband connection and that was split between DSL and cable (cable modem service came late to the area). One of the satellite providers is now bundling DSL service to serve the net hungry population. In any event I doubt that broadband Internet will move past fifty percent penetration until it falls to AOL price levels and, even then, it will probably have to be an AOL or MSN branded service. I was astonished at the quality of the image on satellite tv compared with the local cable service. It may be that higher quality cable plant would produce similar images, but that doesn't exist locally. If the barrier of dish installation (particularly in apartments and condos) didn't exist my guess is our area would have greater than fifty percent satellite penetration. One wonders if the local cable provider will ever get their act together. 2:50:45 AM     My old friend Yann LeCun is heavily into very light weight radio control airplanes - some are small enough to fly indoors!. Check out his page. http://www.lecun.org/hobby/planes.html At the other end of the scale from lightweight electrics are small gas turbines. These have been around for a decade with the first units being based on small automotive turbocharger cores. They are still rare and expensive, but some interesting developments are taking place among experimenters. A turboprop is clearly a non-trivial development http://www.wren-turbines.com/turboprop.htm Wren supports the (nominally English) engine boffin with kits and pieces. This is quite an impressive achievement - note that the gas turbine core has an operating range that goes to 150,000 rpm. 2:50:25 AM

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