Watts Up With That?

The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s’ on-board computers as they crossed the international date line.

The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the International Date Line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious.

I have to think there’s going to come a time when wars are fought by warrior hackers, each trying to take down the other sides computers. Or there may come a day when an airliner falls out of the sky because software failed on all the redundant systems. I sure hope not.

A “computer glitch” when the reporter sent my story to copy editing added an extra “o” to the word “Outlook” in the title, sending my entry into “etherland”.

You can view the entire Outlook Special online at:
http://www2.chicoer.com/specialSections/Outlook_2007/Outlook_2007.pdf (takes awhile to download, my article on Page45, which they added afterwards)

Or you can read it below. If you have been thinking about putting solar on your home, here is a guide. Enjoy.

ER Sustainability Outlook 02/27/07

Sustainability is a trend that is growing not only here, but also throughout the world.

It is an attempt to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the future. Essentially you could think of it as balanced use of the planet, where the use doesn’t outstrip regeneration.

Locally there have been a number of movements towards this goal, particularly with solar power. Butte County is particularly well suited for solar power. Climate records show that we have 219 sunny days and 57 partly cloudy days per year on average, which makes solar power viable. It wasn’t always that way, and it’s only now that solar power is becoming economically viable due to increased electricity costs, increased solar cell efficiency, and state rebate programs to help home and business owners kick-start the process.

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The California legislature may want to revisit the wording of their proposed ban on incandescents (AB 722). California assemblyman LLoyd Levine, a Democrat from Van Nuys in Los Angeles, wants to make California the first to ban incandescent light bulbs (by 2012) part of its new initiatives to reduce energy use and greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. But somebody hasn’t thought this through completely.

Why do I suggest a change? Two reasons: 1- There’s a new efficient challenger to the old tungsten filament light bulb. 2- The Compact Flourescent Lamps touted as “Eco Bulbs” have a small amount of mercury an other heavy metals in them, making disposal a problem. Some landfills won’t take them!

GE has announced an advancement in incandescent technology that promises to increase the efficiency of lightbulbs to put them on par with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL).

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If you live near the ocean, chances are high that your home is built over sandy soil. For example many places in San Francisco are built on sandy soil or fill. Many homes built on this type of soil were badly damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

When an earthquake strikes, deep and sandy soils can turn to liquid by a process known as liquefaction, with disastrous consequences for the buildings above. In an odd application of biotech, researchers at UC Davis have found a way to use bacteria to steady buildings against earthquakes by turning these sandy soils into rocks.

“Starting from a sand pile, you turn it back into sandstone,” the chief researcher explained. It is already possible to inject chemicals into the ground to reinforce it, but this technique can have toxic effects on soil and water. In contrast, the use of common bacteria to “cement” sands has no harmful effects on the environment. The new process, so far tested only at a laboratory scale, takes advantage of a natural soil bacterium, Bacillus pasteurii. The microbe causes calcite (calcium carbonate) to be deposited around sand grains, cementing them together.

So far this method is limited to labs and the researchers are working on scaling their technique.

Below: Before and After electron micrographs of microbiollogically-induced calcite precipitation in which B. pasteurii cells are embedded.

Suppose a commenter posts a libelous comment here at NorCalBlogs. It’s been known to happen. Can the blogger, Enterprise Record, and its corporate owners be sued for defamation? A federal appeals court just held that no, they cannot. The court noted that a federal law was designed to ensure that ‘within broad limits’, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board,’ adding that, were the law otherwise, it would have an ‘obvious chilling effect’ on blogger free speech.

You know you’ve reached critical mass in an argument when you start having editorial cartoons drawn about you.

In this weeks Chico Beat, the editorial cartoon above appeared. While editor Tom Gascoyne would not admit to it being my caricature that was used, a call to artist Steve Ferchaud in Paradise confirmed he used me at Tom’s suggestion of my name.

I consider it high praise to be drawn by Ferchaud, but not so high to be in the Chico Beat.

In any event, by the end of the year 2017, ten plus years from now, we’ll know for sure who’s right. I think it will start to be cooler due to the solar cycle starting to dampen.

What do the numbers 923, 930, 935, 941 and 944 have in common? Answer: They’re different names for the same sunspot, this one shown above.

Greg Piepol of Rockville, Maryland, took the picture yesterday using a Solar Max Solar telescope/camera. It shows sunspot 944 coming around the sun’s eastern limb–for the fifth time! Usually sunspots form and dissolve in a matter of weeks, but this spot has endured for more than five 27-day solar rotations. By long and idiosyncratic tradition, a sunspot receives a new number each time it reappears and is visible to earth.

Sunspot 944 may not seem impressive now, but one month ago as “941″ it was a lovely spiral. Three months ago as “930″ it produced one of the strongest solar flares of the past 25 years and Northern Lights as far south as Arizona. What will it do this time?

Even though we are in between peaks in our 11 year sunspot cycle, we still seem to have quite an active sun. The trend over the last century has been that our solar cycle has had more activity than centuries before.

Of course, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with global warming.

Mila Zinkova of San Francisco who took this picture of the setting sun on Dec. 29, 2006

You have probably heard something about green flashes, but may not have seen one. If so, you’ll be happy to find that a number of pictures of green flashes are available on the Web like the one above. The one pictured above is special because its a TRIPLE green flash which is exceedingly rare. Its explanation lies in refraction of light (as in a prism) in the atmosphere and is enhanced by layered atmospheric inversions and possibly fog.

There was a time when green flashes were thought to be fables. Jules Verne, of all people, fixed them as real in his 1882 novel “Le Rayon Vert” (The Green Ray). He described “a green which no artist could ever obtain on his palette, a green of which neither the varied tints of vegetation nor the shades of the most limpid sea could ever produce the like! If there is a green in Paradise, it cannot be but of this shade, which most surely is the true green of Hope.”

Green flashes are real (not illusory) phenomena seen at sunrise and sunset, when some part of the Sun suddenly changes color (at sunset, from red or orange to green or blue). The word “flash” refers to the sudden appearance and brief duration of this green color, which usually lasts only a second or two.

For an explanation along with some great pictures of the atmospheric optics involved in green flashes and other sorts of colorful atmospheric phenonmena, I recommend this website in the UK: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/

No thats not the title of a new Godzilla movie, but “Deep Fried Rodan” could be.

My friends in journalism say news goes in cycles. If that is so, this must be the year of the creepy crawly restaurant.

Today I see on the TV news the shocking video (a frame of which is shown above) of the Kentucky Fried Chicken combo Taco Bell in New York City’s Greenwich Village that has been taken over by rats and closed down by the health department.

What’s in those buckets anyway? Just kidding, and the trademark bucket in the picture above had a little help using Photoshop. But it makes you wonder just how many restaurants in America are as bad as this?

Oddly, it was exactly one year ago today that we had the China Star meltdown, where police and fire responders to a burglar alarm found a restaurant so incredibly filthy and pest ridden, it defied description.

In his ER article last year, reporter Ari Cohn and Chico PD officer Melody Davidson’s incident report did an admirable job in conveying the heebie jeebies via the written word to anyone whom ever ate there. Today reading the news reports online and then seeing the videos, it was “like Deja Vu all over again”.

I wrote a letter to the editor last year suggesting we need to have color coded health inspection reports posted in the entrance of every restaurant showing its last inspection status. Green for Pass, Yellow for some minor violations, and Red for get the heck outta there ! I still think its a good idea.

Some progress has been made, as now you can get inspection reports online at Butte County’s Health Department. Here is the link: http://www.buttecounty.net/Default.aspx?tabid=312

Reading through the list of inspection reports at the Butte Health Dept website, I was surprised to learn that even some well known and considered “classy” Chico restaurants had some major violations in the last year. If you eat out a lot, this website is worth a look. Any enterprise that sells packaged food, serves food or food samples, including school cafeterias, coffee houses, country clubs, fraternal clubs, and even liquor stores get inspected by the County Health Department.

Here’s a surprising fact: Indian Casinos and their restaurants are exempt from inspections, because tribal operations are considered their own sovereign nation. That may be so, but I think any place that could potentially make people sick through sloppy food handling shouldn’t get a free pass on a legal technicality.

From the France surrenders just to be safe department :

Some “experts” think we should put the U.N. in charge of our space defense against large meteors or asteroids that could wipe out Earth. Ok, let me ask you a question.

Can you name one thing the U.N. has been able to accomplish with complete success? …..Yeah, I thought so.

If the world needs to deflect an asteroid, or even practice doing it, failure is not an option. So rather than leave the fate of the world in the hands of this, ahem, “capable” diplomatic organization, who you gonna call? (Hint, they have headquarters in Florida and Texas). Please, leave space work to space agencies, and the hand wringing to diplomats.

SAN FRANCISCO (Feb. 18) – An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday.

Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.

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Above: Members of United Bloggers Local 107 demonstrate near the Enterprise Record office on Monday

Tuesday, Feburary 20th, 2007

Some are finding the working conditions making it impossible to keep up

Chico, CA – (BP)

Bloggers toiling in unpaid slavery for local media giant the Enterprise Record, recently found themselves without working blog software for an entire weekend. The problem brought to light something each blogger knew individually, but not collectively. The tool they were given, Moveable Type, is as outdated and unwieldy as a Gutenberg press or a hot lead Linotype machine.

Some bloggers who got the software installed early in the game, such as Dan Nguyen-Tan, have few problems, and his features such as scheduled publishing work flawlessly. He is one of the elite few whose seniority gets him special perks. Others such as newcomers Jack Lee and Anthony Watts, find the software often breaks down or doesn’t work at all putting them dangerously close to falling under the wheels of the Media News Group behemoth.

Watts, whom is often thought of as the most technically capable member of the group because he runs his own computer enterprise with dozens of servers and websites was quoted as saying “This software has been broken for some time. We are forced to make our quota, and yet the tools we are given often break down getting us even further behind. I fear that soon I’ll be called into Wolf Rosenbergs office and given 20 lashes”.

Jack Lee, whom tries to Blog every day was quoted as saying that the company that produced the software, SixApart “should be called FallingApart, because the software is not user freindly and breaks often”.

Problems with the software such as features that don’t work for many bloggers, templates that don’t work, a non-existent spell checker, a broken scheduler, and nearly impossible to read 8 point composition font has made keeping up with the blogging quota nearly impossible.

Blogger burnout has been all too common.

Some bloggers who joined in recent months, such as Monte Hill, made just a few entries, and were ever heard from again. Some disappeared even before they got started, such as “Dependency Update”. Liberal Blogger John Drzal, found the problem of keeping his quota so stressful, that he’s been spending his remaining days on a farm hoping to eke out a living.

Talk of a bloggers strike has been circulating around the network. Watts was quoted as saying “We don’t get paid, and they won’t even give us the tools to do our job effectively. Many bloggers have gone missing, and the remaining few are beginning to fear for their sanity because they get chastized for spelling errors constantly. We don’t even have a spell checker, and this is the 21st century!”.

He added “We may ask the Mayor to join our cause and help us stand up to this unfair and uncaring media giant, but if that fails, we may have no choice but to do a blogout”. “A lot of people will suffer needlesly if that happens but its the only tool we have.”

Enterprise Record officials were unavailable for comment as of press time.

From the Buford ain’t taking the rap department:

A Georgia couple, apparently tired of people speeding past their house, installed a camera and radar gun on their property. After it was installed, they caught a police officer going 17MPH over the posted speed limit. They brought this to the attention of the local police department, and are now being forced to appear in front of a judge to answer to charges of “stalking”.

Here’s the story from the Cartersville Georgia Daily Tribune:

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Last May I moved into a new Energy Star featured home in a new subdivision in northeast Chico. I appreciated the rating, and my utility bills were lower than the home I sold that I had installed solar power on. The appliances are all Energy Star rated efficient and thats good. I still plan to put solar on this home, but the process takes a lot of planning.

This weekend I decided to finish some work I started in upgrading the light switches from standard to the flat rocker switch stylish models. It also happened that yesterday was a strong north wind. While taking the light switch covers off I noticed cold air coming out of the switchplate holes, and when the covers were off completely, I could feel a significant breeze!

Thinking maybe it was just the one I was working on, I started to check other switches and outlets in the room, then the whole house. Yep, with the north wind pressurizing my attic, it was like having vents all around the room. I had hoped that the contractor would have sealed the hole where wires come down from the attic into the interior of the house. Its easy to do, and takes only a quick shot of sealing foam. No such luck.

The outside air instrusion wastes a lot of energy in heating/cooling, it also brings a lot of dust into the house. Time to get out the Great Stuff. It baffles me that contractors don’t foam seal all utility holes in and out of a home as a matter of course. Its easy and inexpensive, and far easier to do when the home is being built. You’d think any new home built today would have this done standard, especially ones that are touting Energy Star rated appliances and other energy saving features.

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Previously I’ve blogged about the new Microsoft Operating system, Vista. As much as I didn’t want to, I finally had to break down and purchase Vista to be able to test software that my company produces. Even that is no easy task, because in a bizarre hair brained marketing scheme, Vista comes in several different flavors where its predecessor only came in two.

I decided to pick the middle of the road Home Premium edition for my testing. And, since you can’t return software, and because the software costs $200, I decided to buy it pre-installed on a laptop, that way if I need to I can return the laptop with Vista installed. That turned out to be a smart move, as today I’m on my way back to COMPUSA to return the whole mess.

Vista is, well…I’ve searched for the appropriate words to describe it, and there are just so many it’s rather hard to choose. But I’ve decided on the phrase eye candy.

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Spanish security forces surround a hijacked Air Mauritania Boeing 737 passenger plane after it landed at Gando airport in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria in Spain’s Canary Islands yesterday.

Ya gotta love it when some hijacker gets what’s coming to him like this one did.

Fast-thinking pilot foiled hijack
February 16, 2007

TENERIFE, Spain (AP) — A fast-thinking pilot, with the help of passengers, fooled a gunman who had hijacked a jetliner flying from Africa to the Canary Islands, braking hard upon landing then quickly accelerating to knock the man down so travelers could pounce on him, Spanish officials said Friday.

A lone gunman brandishing two pistols hijacked the Air Mauritania Boeing 737, carrying 71 passengers and a crew of eight, Thursday evening shortly after it took off from the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott for Gran Canaria, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, with a planned stopover in Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania.

He wanted to divert the plane to France so he could request political asylum, said Mohamed Ould Mohamed Cheikh, Mauritania’s top police official.

The hijacker has been identified as Mohamed Abderraman, a 32-year-old Mauritanian, said an official with the Spanish Interior Ministry office on Tenerife, another of the islands in the Atlantic archipelago. He spoke under rules barring publication of his name. Mauritania has said the hijacker was a Moroccan from the Western Sahara.

The hijacker ordered the pilot to fly to France, but the crew told him there was not enough fuel. Morocco denied a request for the plane to land in the city of Djala in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, so the pilot headed for Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, the original destination.

Speaking to the gunman during the hijacking, the pilot realized the man did not speak French. So he used the plane’s public address system to warn the passengers in French of the ploy he was going to try: brake hard upon landing, then speed up abruptly. The idea was to catch the hijacker off balance, and have crew members and men sitting in the front rows of the plane jump on him, the Spanish official said.

The pilot also warned women and children to move to the back of the plane in preparation for the subterfuge, the official said.

It worked. The man was standing in the middle aisle when the pilot carried out his maneuver, and he fell to the floor, dropping one of his two 7mm pistols. Flight attendants then threw boiling water from a coffee machine in his face and at his chest, and some 10 people jumped on the man and beat him, the Spanish official said.

Around 20 people were slightly injured when the plane braked suddenly, the official said.

Spanish officials — and some passengers — had initially been concerned that the hijacking was terrorism-related; it came on the day a trial began of 29 people accused of the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

“We were afraid. We thought it was people from al-Qaida or the Algerian GSPC who were going to cut our throats,” said Aicha Mint Sidi, a 45-year-old woman who was on the plane. The GSPC is a Muslim extremist group.

“I trembled during and after the hijacking. I thought the plane was going to blow up any minute, either in mid-air or on landing,” said another passenger, Dahi Ould Ali, 52. Both spoke after returning to Nouakchott.

The hijacker was arrested by Spanish police who boarded the plane after it landed at Gando airport, outside Las Palmas.

Air Mauritania identified the heroic pilot as Ahmedou Mohamed Lemine, a 20-year-veteran of the company.

This past weekend I stumbled across an old original (or so I thought) Star Trek episode called “The Doomsday Machine” where a big ugly “horn-o-plenty” looking space robot goes around munching up whole worlds for the sheer mindless fun of it. (Insert your own Wal-Mart joke here)

My 3 1/2 year old son William, who has never seen Star Trek, was immediately mesmerized by the episode, and he and daddy played “space rock monster” using a brown blanket after seeing the evil beast, which looked in the original series like a paper mache’ horn-o-plenty, like you might make in first grade around Thanksgiving, suspended on strings with model space ships around it over a star background. In fact, it was exactly how that was done.

You could always count of the original TV show looking a bit cheesy in the effects department. It goes with William Shatner’s anguished overacting perfectly.

But something about the episode I saw this weekend on Channel 30 caught my eye…lo and behold, the cheesy effects were gone! And while the ‘horn-o-plenty turned space beast’ was still there, it now took on some new 3 dimensional qualities…and then I saw some 3D flybys over the wrecked hulk of the USS Constellation, which also figured in this episode…and to my surprise…IT LOOKED REAL.

Holy cow! Even the view-screen scenes from the deck of the Enterprise look different! Whats going on?

Doing a little web searching I found this: CBS Paramount Confirms Original Star Trek Episodes Have Been Remastered and Updated – High-Definition version of the 1960’s series, featuring new special effects to air soon

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The “Big Ben” Cray XT3 at University of Pittsburg Computer Center runs at 10 Teraflops

Ok if you aren’t computer savvy. you might think “tri-tera-flops…a dinosaur?” or maybe “Tera Flops” which could be a headline about a movie star with a bad gig.

But FLOPS which stands for FLoating Point Operations Per Second is a measure of the numerical calculation power of a computer, be it a PC or a mainframe. Supercomputers are often measured in Teraflops or Trillions of Flops per second.

And now, its all in one chip. Intel has produced a prototype, shown below:

The Teraflops chip is built on a single die composed of 80 independent processor cores, or tiles as Intel is calling them. The tiles are arranged in a rectangle 8 tiles across and 10 tiles down; each tile has a surface area of 3 square millimeters. And that isn’t all, in a unique manufacturing technique, each die is “stacked” in 3 dimensions, making the chip multi-layed with components not only in breadth, but in depth.

The chip can operate at a number of speeds depending on its operating voltage, but the minimum clock speed necessary to maintain its teraflop name is 3.13GHz at 1Volt. At that speed and voltage, the peak performance of the chip with all 80 cores active is 1 teraflop while drawing 98 Watts of power. At 4GHz, the chip can deliver a peak performance of 1.28 TFLOP, pulling 181 Watts at 1.2Volt. On the low end of the spectrum, the chip can run at 1GHz, consuming 11 Watts and executing a maximum of 310 billion floating point operations per second. Heat dissipation for this chip will be huge, so I expect a water cooling system will be used to acheive the peak performance.

It may be 1 or 2 years, but you’ll soon be able to have your own Teraflop Desktop.

Due to the interest in my space junk entry below, I thought I’d provide an up to date list of all the objects in low earth orbit and who the countries are that launched them or discarded them. The US and USSR are the two biggest, no surprise there, but the USSR leads the way in space debris, 2-1. Mr. Putin, take out your garbage!

The big table of space junk follows….

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