Friday, January 31, 2003

What if Abe Lincoln was a PowerPoint fan? Imagine a ppt version of the Gettysburg Address. 5:53:18 AM     There are still many mysteries in nature and it is extremely nice when one is fully or partially explained. How do small raindrops fall? Raindrops is traditionally described in two steps (going back to my old atmospheric physics books) - tiny droplets smaller than 20 microns grow through condensation. At about 20 microns gravity becomes important and the drops fall slowly growing as they combine. Unfortunately if you do the math the droplet takes about twice as long to grow to 20 microns as the average rain cloud lasts. There are any number of theories to deal with this, but some new work at BNL is particularly interesting (note - if you are not an APS member you can get a copy at any good technical library). Statistical nucleation is applied based on turbulence, density and droplet size distributions. It turns out once a drop reaches a certain size it becomes energetically favorable for it to grow rapidly. An interesting piece of the work is that it explains the effect of pollution particles on droplet growth. It turns out that pollution particles increase the critical radius needed for rapid growth - this makes polluted clouds more stable and less likely to precipitate. There is still much work to be done, but this is an intriguing explanation! 5:51:44 AM     Yesterday I had the opportunity to play with a 12 inch Powerbook G4. An amazing little machine - there is a full sized keyboard in its small form factor and you can burn dvds and cds without any attachments. All of this and it is essentially a stable Unix box. Very very desirable. Beautiful, fast, small, stable, long battery life, 802.11g and zero Microsoft if you wish. This is the first laptop that brings words like watch and jewelery to mind. --- Another interesting piece of hardware is the HP Color Laserjet 2500L. I saw one of these at a friend's house a few days ago. It is a physically small usb based color laser printer. Two items that make it special are (1) it is uses PostScript level 3 (albeit a PS clone), and (2) it is only $1000. I connected it to my OS X Powerbook and the computer recognized the printer without any fuss. Print quality was excellent. This isn't a photoquality printer, but it does an outstanding job on business graphics and would probably quickly close the cost of ownership with a good inkjet printer if you printed 1500 to 2000 pages. My only complaint is that it is usb based. A $1000 printer needs an Ethernet connection. HP offers a version with one, but it costs $1500 - quite a premium for $20 in parts. Still - if you are setting up a home office and need a color printer, I would give this serious consideration. 5:49:26 AM

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