I’ve found a new best friend on the internet:
MAKE: Blog
This site is where people talk about things they made. Geeky things…. “we show you how to make your own mag stripe reader”, etc…
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Author: paddlefish
This article from Nature talks about how species from around the world could be used to replace extinct north american species in the wild. No, they’re not talking about spotted owls — they’re talking Cheetahs and Elephants and Camels, oh my…
Re-wilding North America
“Managed elephant populations could similarly benefit ranchers through grassland maintenance and ecotourism (Fig. 1). Five species of proboscidians (mammoths, mastadons and gomphotheres) once roamed North America in the Late Pleistocene; today many of the remaining African and Asian elephants are in grave danger[…]”
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Updated USB PicKit
A while back I put up a modified version of USB PicKit that works with Mac OS X.
Well, Jeff Boly has taken up the lead now so cruise on over to his site for the latest USB PicKit software for Mac OS X and Linux.
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XML bindings with flash
A little experiment with Flash MX 2004 Professional.
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Best In Show!
Macworld: News: Macworld Expo: Best of Show
Macworld Expo: Best of Show
By Jim Dalrymple
The editors of Macworld have scoured the show floor to find the most innovative products at this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo. This year we have 14 products that we felt highlighted the commitment Macintosh developers have for the platform. Here are the 2006 Best of Show winners.
Adobe Lightroom, which Adobe released on Monday as a public beta for the Mac, takes a new approach to working with your photos…
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Alan Alda’s book
“never have your dog stuffed”. Yes, he actually talks about when his dad had his dead pet taken to the taxidermist. And Alan’s life was so unusual and curious that it doesn’t even seem that odd.
Alan Alda, whom most of the world probably remembers for his great contribution to the classic television show, M*A*S*H, weaves a delightful tale about the twists and turns his life has taken so far. Before reading his book, I’d admired him more for his work on “Scientific American Frontiers”. But now most of all, this biography brought me insight into his life. He talks frankly about family troubles and the ways he got through tough scrapes. I think I would like him if I ever met him…. in fact, I almost feel like he and I are alike in some ways.
We both have a curiosity about science, some interest in theater (him obviously more than I — hee hee), and a kindness towards others. But although it has been ten years since I’ve been involved in any theater, I recognized myself in some of the ways he approach learning how to act. He had a deliberate, logical tack to dissecting this challenge of moving and speaking as though you were someone else. Not unlike how I’d try to do it, I imagine.
But man, what a bizaare upbringing he had.
Anyhow, check out the book. Very fine read.
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The eight units of radioactivity
I’m reading an interesting-yet-frustrating book about Chernobyl called “Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl” by Mary Mycio. It is interesting simply because I didn’t know much about what happened at Chernobyl immediately after the disaster and in the two decades since.
The frustrating thing is that the narrative style is disjointed and rambling. Fascinating tidbits are sprinkled amongst sort of boring day-to-day info about her travels there. Also frustrating is her random use of units.
The units aren’t really her fault — just as with temperature and length measurements, there are “common” and “system international” (si, or metric) units for radioactivity, too. But to further confuse the issue, radioactivity is divided into four different categories : Radioactivity, Absorbed Dose, Dose Equivalent, and Exposure.
| Radioactivity | Absorbed Dose | Dose Equivalent | Exposure | |
| Common Units | curie (Ci) | rad | rem | roentgen (R) |
| SI Units | becquerel (Bq) | gray (Gy) | sievert (Sv) | coulomb/kilogram (C/kg) |
The first unit, Radiation, is simply a measure of how many atoms spontaneously disintegrate in a unit of time. As you would expect from SI units, the becquerel is exceptionally straightforward at one disintegration per second. The curie is 37 billion becquerels. Why? That is how much radiation is in one gram of the element radium.
The rad and grey are both a measure of how much radiation is absorbed by the tissue of a person. Again, SI rules the day with a simple definition of a grey as one Joule of energy absorbed per kilogram. The older rad unit is 0.01 grey. If you’re good on SI prefixes, you’d realize that a rad is a centigrey (not to be confused with the old name for the Celcius temperature unit, centigrade).
Next up : Dose Equivalent. These units attempt to assess how much damage the radiation would do to living tissue based on the type of radiation. The effectiveness of radiation in damaging tissue is known as its relative biological effectiveness (r.b.e.). Alpha particles have a higher ability to damage tissue than X-Rays or gamma rays, so it may have an r.b.e. of up to 20 whereas the r.b.e for x-ray and gamma radiation is 1. The seivert is the SI unit for dose equivalent, and it equal to the greys times the r.b.e. The rem is the common unit for dose equivalent, and it is equal to the rads times the r.b.e. So 1 seivert is 100 rems.
So while this is confusing, imaging how frustrating it is to understand Mary Mycio’s book when she bandies about becquerels and curies in the same paragraph. It is like saying, “It was so hot in the desert today — it got up to 40 degrees C, but it was a mild 70 degrees F here in Minneapolis.” Not so intuitive.
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Custom tunneling via SSH
Warning: serious geekery here. I’m posting this for my own future reference.
if you’re behind a firewall but want to use a service from the world wide web…. ssh to the rescue! Or is it ssh is the curse of IS admins? Well it is their own fault for thinking that blocking port X outbound is going to stop me from using service Y on port Z.
SSH TUNNEL
If you can connect to the remote server using SSH, then we can setup
a secure tunnell through SSH for your POP communications. The tunnell connects
a port on your local machine ( say 1234 ) to the POP3 port ( port 110 )
of your remote server.
$ ssh -P -f -L 1234:remoteserver:110 user@remoteserver sleep 25
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Introducing Adobe Lightroom
Today, Adobe Systems Inc. announced Lightroom, a new application designed for the pro photographer. In a bold new move for the company, Adobe has released an public beta so you can try out this new software for free!
More later…
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Gasoline Followup
Here is the message I received back from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency:
The tank inspector for the Metro went out to the site you sent in a
citizen complaint about, and here is her response:
Jxx Mxxxx, Sxxxx, and I went to the neighborhood today. We walked
along 16th Ave NE between Buchanan and Lincoln and looked into all the
storm drains. There were no petroleum odors and we did not observe any
petroleum sheen in any of the drains. The closest gas USTs are at 1847
Johnson St NE and we felt they were too far away from the site. The gas
station at 1847 Johnson St NE was inspected in August 2003 (by me). The
other closest gas station is on the east side of 35W and again, we felt
too far away. We drove up the alley between Buchanan and Lincoln and
observed a garage (at 16h and Lincoln) that has a 55 gallon drum with
small diameter piping going from the drum into the garage. We did not
observe any leakage from the drum. To summarize, we didn’t smell any
petroleum odors, so I am considering this incident closed.
(I changed the names, as I feel these people are doing a good job and I don’t see the need to plaster their names all over the internet.)
On the one hand, I guess I am glad that whatever the problem is it is small enough that they couldn’t detect it.
On the other hand, what exactly did I observe that they couldn’t?
If I smell it again, I will try to take more notes, possibly a sample (?)….