OddLinks

The Museum of Hoaxes has provided a semi-official top ten list of April fools hoaxes. What more can I say, fun stuff.

A museum of hoaxes... who knew?

On this day - Feb 16

Someone sent me this, I'm not going to find it interesting if I get it every day ;-(

On this day in 1986, the USSR launched Mir. In 1982, Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for increasing ground water levels at The Alamo. In 1878, Thomas Edison patented the phonograph, and in 1600, Huaynaputina erupted in Peru. Happy Birthday Benecio Del Toro (1967), Prince Andrew, Duke of York (1960), Smokey Robinson (1940), and Nicolaus Copernicus (1473). RIP Johnny Paycheck (d.2003), Deng Xiaoping (d.1997), Bon Scott (d.1980), and Ernst Mach (d.1916).

I have been playing with an image regularization program which is a free program implementing such features as removing objects (demos of shooting through a wire fence on the demo page), making small images larger, and reducing noise in noisy images. It's free, available for download and there are many demo images there.

I did extract one thumbnail image blown up 500% and compare it to the best software I have to do the same thing. the images produced by the greyc program were clearly the best, although a 500% zoom produces images which are pretty fuzzy in any case. I intend to see hom well it takes noise out of scans of printed pictures and returns the color dots to smooth images.

A note of warning on the documentation Look at the examples unless you're a math major or calculus is fresh in your mind. Happily you can get good results without having your head explode.

There is an interesting phenominon call "entangled particles" which allows two particles from a split atom to "stay in touch" such that what happens to one happens to both at the same time, regardless of the distance of their separation.

A physicist with good credentials has proposed an experiment which will prove or disprove his theory that entangled particles share information not faster than the speed of light, but by sending the information into the past so it can arive "on time" traveling at the speed of light.

What makes this interesting is that the research is now publicly funded, since DARPA decided the research was too far-out for them. Note that they are funding research on creating terminator-like liquid robots. The difference is that time travel doesn't kill people.

New extra-solar planets are being found on a regular basis, to the extent that they no longer make headlines, or in many cases print in the popular press. But discovery of a planet of Earth-like size and temperature, especially only 20 light years away, has interesting possibilities for both communication and better investigation by current and future tool. For instance, observation by multiple telescopes can now be merged to give pictures better than any available from a single telescope. Combine that with Earth's orbit, about 16 light minutes in diameter, and stereo pictures become possible. Okay, 91 millionths of a degree of separation isn't going to help a lot, but it is far better than we could get with the more distant planets found so far.

It's also interesting that with a 40 year round trip for radio communication, some form of interactive information exchange is possible, although knock-knock jokes are probably not practical unless the folks at the other end are very long-lived and patient.

Here's some fun reading on global warming (aka climate change). The article details 26 myths about climate change, explains why they either aren't true or don't mean what polluters would like them to mean, and include a raft of links to studies and papers by relevant scientists (people who study climate for a living) which back the opinions offered. Actually a far more balanced presentation than it sounds, in some cases the opinion is more like "we know this doesn't work as the myth claims, but it does in fact matter, we just don't have evidence to quantify the effect yet."

I haven't used this as a checklist against points in Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, but I think that a few of the conclusions in that film may not mean what or as much as you could infer from the movie. I support the conclusions of the movie, but I don't think for a moment it's unbiased or free of selected interpretation.

Site Democracy Now brings us a story carried by the BBC but suppressed in the USA. It involves about 500 E-mails regarding the firing of eight federal prosecutors, are were available because they were misaddressed and wound up in responsible hands. At the link are further links to an MP3 of the radio interview, and a link to the video (I haven't had the right bandwidth to view it yet). Looks like a smoking finger-check to me.

I have to wonder how information which is available on the Internet and a major international news service didn't show up when our legislators were looking into the matter. Note that as of June 5th, there have been no impeachments proposed, censures offered, or even non-binding "sense of the Congress" resolutions. Here's my sense of the congress, they are still more worried about winning elections than doing the right thing. They wave their hands, blow smoke, and do nothing.

Imagine a world of water, circling close to a low output sun, so close that the top of the atmosphere is nothing but vapor, and the gravity creates pressure at the bottom of the atmosphere so great that the hard surface of the planet is miles of ice VII at 300°C! Okay, stop imagining, this is not a science fiction story, it's a real planet only 30 light years away, circling a star called called GJ 436.

Being such a great setting for a science fiction novel, and so close that exchanges via radio are possible, it would be a perfect setting for some talented writer like Hal Clement. Clement wrote a neat story called Iceworld in 1953, which along with Sand of Mars was my introduction to SF. In Iceworld a visitor from a hot planet comes to visit Earth in a hot suit. I got my copy autographed in the early 1970s at a science fiction convention.

Of course if we went there, another more famous Hal Clement novel called Mission of Gravity would apply, the hot water world around GJ 436 has a mass of about 12 times the Earth and appropriate gravity for a Neptune sized planet. In Mission of Gravity the planet rotated so fast that the effective gravity at the equator was livable by humans, with full gravity at the poles. I don't think we are ready to visit a planet with a surface at 300°C regardless of gravity, but it's an interesting thought, as is speculation on what might evolve if there is a layer of superfluid water between the vapor and the ice.

There is now an unofficial Firefox toolbar for eBay, released before the officail one hit the net. It was developed by a bunch of Stanford students, and is available for download.

This is pretty neat, a peek at the result looks as if someone who did a lot of eBay autions would be glad to have this add-on. It currently works with the US (www.ebay.com) site, but the next version will support European sites as well. The download page also tells you how to configure for automatic upgrade. I have to think about the implications of that and security.

If you ever had any doubt that the US Patent Office was buried in weird patents (or perhaps that should be "patents for weird stuff?"), consider patent 5500234, for a "potato chip marshmallow sandwich." Two or more layers of "crispy type edible food product such as a potato chip or corn chip," separated by "an intermediate marshmallow layer being in contact with the inner surface of each crispy chip and one or more filler substances such as chocolate, peanut butter spread, etc. disposed between the two marshmallow layers." Yum!

Scientists recently measured the age of an old star in six independent ways, and concluded that it was the oldest known, about 13.2 billion years old. The report in Physorg doesn't give the interesting details about why this star has been stable so long, nor many details about the affiliation and funding of the investigators.

What is really interesting is that I just mentioned a report on how dark matter may have snuffed out the early stars. I find the reconciliation of the "snuff" theory and the old star fun to watch.

For people who like to read about physics theories, there are a bunch of excerpts from the book "New Physics and the Mind" on line. I haven't decided if I want to buy the book, the style becomes wordy, pretentious, and verbose at times, it would be a much smaller tome were I the editor; some paragraphs could be reduced, combined, or simply eliminated.

In spite of that the science is interesting, so it make a good, if somewhat ponderous, read.

Tivo has been granted a US Patent, number 7216235, for a password locked disk drive which will send challenges to the host and require that the challenge be XORed with the lock key, and the response then be encrypted and sent back to the drive. And the drive will send other challenges to the host from time to time, to verify the authenticity of the key.

relaxed cat

This seems to have some of the characteristics of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, some of the ssh protocol2 repeated changing of the key (not clear if the data from the drive to the host is encrypted), and generally sounds like over-solving the problem by using a lot of proprietary hardware.

It also seems to have little value over just encrypting the data on the drive in the first place. Perhaps the goal is not to protect anything, but rather to avoid having cheap large disk drives put in Tivo hardware without paying for a larger system.; Note that DVRs will use an external hard drive, but will encrypt the data on it. Sounds like a better solution to me.

NASA is developing a "lab on a chip" to test for and identify various types of bacteria which might infect a space ship. The goal in the next few years is to identify over a hundred common bacteria and some fungi. Tests are ongoing, on the ISS and in the arctic.

VMware has released a new virtual environment for VISTA which runs on Linux or Windows. While I see it as a way to run VISTA without the security issues of having a physical Microsoft deployment, I suspect that people will see it as a way to run VISTA on their old Windows machines without an upgrade to the hardware. I could be misreading the announcement.

This could be useful to Linux users who have the need to run some limited VISTA software, but who trust the native Linux firewalling capability more than the vendor VISTA firewall. The capability of 3rd parties firewalls and security software has been questioned, and some Microsoft features make the type of control over the network more difficult than it was with XP.

Motorola has patented a new method of embedding solar power capability into a display screen. This leads to the possibility of cell phones which charge themselves. Motorola also mentioned touch screen displays and organic LEDs in the patent. If a commercial product were actually available with this technology, it would probably appeal to more people than the iPhone, since more bells and whistles on a phone only adds marginal value, but a phone you don't have to remember to charge would have real appeal to many people.

Motorola is looking for openings in the cell market, I believe. I'm still trying to get the "dumb phone" for my service. That's the Motorola phone which is just a phone with long battery life. No games, Internet, video, color, just a phone which will run a long time because it doesn't use power on non-voice frills.

You can get a PDF report on the state of Open Source Software, as viewed by 100 commercial software companies, here.

As Robert Burns (Scottish poet, 1759-1796) said,

“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion”

Keyboard magazine has published an article on using Linux for audio processing. It probably underestimates the technical capabilities of the reader, and feels as though the author is talking down to the audience, but it does point out the significant software available, and has a number of useful links.

They failed to mention audacity, my own personal favorite for editing audio after capture. It allows a mix of visual and audible information to be easily used in an intuitive way to identify sections and modify them as desired.

For physics enthusiasts, there's a report on the role of dark matter in the early universe. And the original paper is also available in PDF and the theoretically challenged can still get the sense of the paper by reading past all the math between conclusions. I followed some of it, but in several places I took their word for it as assumed "here a miracle occurs" and went on.

OddLinks - Observations on oddities in my life for those who don't have one


	About Comments on some of the odd stuff which comes into my life. I honestly don't see why people find this interesting, but clearly they do. Subscribe Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS. My serious essays In addition to my babbling here, I do write serious essays on serious topics. You can read the current stuff as a blog, or look at some of the more popular essays in an archive. Links These are a few of my favourite links. *IX Upstate NY UNIX Users Group userfriendly FOSS legal issues	Tue, 01 Apr 2008 Top ten hoaxes of all time (03:00) The Museum of Hoaxes has provided a semi-official top ten list of April fools hoaxes. What more can I say, fun stuff. A museum of hoaxes... who knew? [/2008/04/01] permanent link Sat, 16 Feb 2008 this day - Feb 16 (05:41) On this day - Feb 16 Someone sent me this, I'm not going to find it interesting if I get it every day ;-( On this day in 1986, the USSR launched Mir. In 1982, Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for increasing ground water levels at The Alamo. In 1878, Thomas Edison patented the phonograph, and in 1600, Huaynaputina erupted in Peru. Happy Birthday Benecio Del Toro (1967), Prince Andrew, Duke of York (1960), Smokey Robinson (1940), and Nicolaus Copernicus (1473). RIP Johnny Paycheck (d.2003), Deng Xiaoping (d.1997), Bon Scott (d.1980), and Ernst Mach (d.1916). [/2008/02/16] permanent link Tue, 11 Dec 2007 FreeAgent drive fix for non-VISTA OS (21:15) Fixing the FreeAgent (Seagate) drive for Linux # the drive reports something like this $ sudo sdparm -a /dev/sde /dev/sde: Seagate FreeAgent Pro 400A Power condition mode page: IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0] STANDBY 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1] ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0] SCT 9000 [cha: y, def:9000, sav:9000] # when the drive was idled I got the following error message. $ sudo sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sde /dev/sde: Seagate FreeAgent Pro 400A change_mode_page: failed setting page: Power condition # this appears to force the drive to start $ sudo sdparm --command=start /dev/sde # and now this command works $ sudo sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sde $ sudo sdparm -a /dev/sde /dev/sde: Seagate FreeAgent Pro 400A Power condition mode page: IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0] STANDBY 0 [cha: n, def: 1, sav: 0] ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0] SCT 0 [cha: n, def:9000, sav: 0] I found that writing a one "1" to /sys/block/sdN/scsi_disk/allow_restart will fix this. Then I read: sdparm --defaults --page=po -6 --save /dev/sdb which seems to make it permanent. (not tested yet). There's also a sleeping drive fix in this Ubuntu writeup on backups. [/2007/12/11] permanent link* Thu, 09 Aug 2007 A neat new open source image processing application (07:37) I have been playing with an image regularization program which is a free program implementing such features as removing objects (demos of shooting through a wire fence on the demo page), making small images larger, and reducing noise in noisy images. It's free, available for download and there are many demo images there. I did extract one thumbnail image blown up 500% and compare it to the best software I have to do the same thing. the images produced by the greyc program were clearly the best, although a 500% zoom produces images which are pretty fuzzy in any case. I intend to see hom well it takes noise out of scans of printed pictures and returns the color dots to smooth images. A note of warning on the documentation Look at the examples unless you're a math major or calculus is fresh in your mind. Happily you can get good results without having your head explode. [/2007/03/09] permanent link Thu, 14 Jun 2007 New entangled particle research (21:34) There is an interesting phenominon call "entangled particles" which allows two particles from a split atom to "stay in touch" such that what happens to one happens to both at the same time, regardless of the distance of their separation. A physicist with good credentials has proposed an experiment which will prove or disprove his theory that entangled particles share information not faster than the speed of light, but by sending the information into the past so it can arive "on time" traveling at the speed of light. What makes this interesting is that the research is now publicly funded, since DARPA decided the research was too far-out for them. Note that they are funding research on creating terminator-like liquid robots. The difference is that time travel doesn't kill people. [/2007/06/14] permanent link Fri, 08 Jun 2007 Earth-like planet discovered (05:14) New extra-solar planets are being found on a regular basis, to the extent that they no longer make headlines, or in many cases print in the popular press. But discovery of a planet of Earth-like size and temperature, especially only 20 light years away, has interesting possibilities for both communication and better investigation by current and future tool. For instance, observation by multiple telescopes can now be merged to give pictures better than any available from a single telescope. Combine that with Earth's orbit, about 16 light minutes in diameter, and stereo pictures become possible. Okay, 91 millionths of a degree of separation isn't going to help a lot, but it is far better than we could get with the more distant planets found so far. It's also interesting that with a 40 year round trip for radio communication, some form of interactive information exchange is possible, although knock-knock jokes are probably not practical unless the folks at the other end are very long-lived and patient. [/2007/06/08] permanent link Thu, 07 Jun 2007 26 myths about climate change clarified (05:21) Here's some fun reading on global warming (aka climate change). The article details 26 myths about climate change, explains why they either aren't true or don't mean what polluters would like them to mean, and include a raft of links to studies and papers by relevant scientists (people who study climate for a living) which back the opinions offered. Actually a far more balanced presentation than it sounds, in some cases the opinion is more like "we know this doesn't work as the myth claims, but it does in fact matter, we just don't have evidence to quantify the effect yet." I haven't used this as a checklist against points in Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, but I think that a few of the conclusions in that film may not mean what or as much as you could infer from the movie. I support the conclusions of the movie, but I don't think for a moment it's unbiased or free of selected interpretation. [/2007/06/07] permanent link Wed, 06 Jun 2007 Federal prosecutor 'missing E-mail' found (14:22) Site Democracy Now brings us a story carried by the BBC but suppressed in the USA. It involves about 500 E-mails regarding the firing of eight federal prosecutors, are were available because they were misaddressed and wound up in responsible hands. At the link are further links to an MP3 of the radio interview, and a link to the video (I haven't had the right bandwidth to view it yet). Looks like a smoking finger-check to me. I have to wonder how information which is available on the Internet and a major international news service didn't show up when our legislators were looking into the matter. Note that as of June 5th, there have been no impeachments proposed, censures offered, or even non-binding "sense of the Congress" resolutions. Here's my sense of the congress, they are still more worried about winning elections than doing the right thing. They wave their hands, blow smoke, and do nothing. [/2007/06/06] permanent link Tue, 05 Jun 2007 The real 'hot planet' has been found (15:25) Imagine a world of water, circling close to a low output sun, so close that the top of the atmosphere is nothing but vapor, and the gravity creates pressure at the bottom of the atmosphere so great that the hard surface of the planet is miles of ice VII at 300°C! Okay, stop imagining, this is not a science fiction story, it's a real planet only 30 light years away, circling a star called called GJ 436. Being such a great setting for a science fiction novel, and so close that exchanges via radio are possible, it would be a perfect setting for some talented writer like Hal Clement. Clement wrote a neat story called Iceworld in 1953, which along with Sand of Mars was my introduction to SF. In Iceworld a visitor from a hot planet comes to visit Earth in a hot suit. I got my copy autographed in the early 1970s at a science fiction convention. Of course if we went there, another more famous Hal Clement novel called Mission of Gravity would apply, the hot water world around GJ 436 has a mass of about 12 times the Earth and appropriate gravity for a Neptune sized planet. In Mission of Gravity the planet rotated so fast that the effective gravity at the equator was livable by humans, with full gravity at the poles. I don't think we are ready to visit a planet with a surface at 300°C regardless of gravity, but it's an interesting thought, as is speculation on what might evolve if there is a layer of superfluid water between the vapor and the ice. [/2007/06/05] permanent link Sat, 02 Jun 2007 eBay toolbar for Firefox (08:14) There is now an unofficial Firefox toolbar for eBay, released before the officail one hit the net. It was developed by a bunch of Stanford students, and is available for download. This is pretty neat, a peek at the result looks as if someone who did a lot of eBay autions would be glad to have this add-on. It currently works with the US (www.ebay.com) site, but the next version will support European sites as well. The download page also tells you how to configure for automatic upgrade. I have to think about the implications of that and security. [/2007/06/02] permanent link Fri, 01 Jun 2007 Potato chip marshmallow sandwich patent (12:35) If you ever had any doubt that the US Patent Office was buried in weird patents (or perhaps that should be "patents for weird stuff?"), consider patent 5500234, for a "potato chip marshmallow sandwich." Two or more layers of "crispy type edible food product such as a potato chip or corn chip," separated by "an intermediate marshmallow layer being in contact with the inner surface of each crispy chip and one or more filler substances such as chocolate, peanut butter spread, etc. disposed between the two marshmallow layers." Yum! [/2007/06/01] permanent link Thu, 31 May 2007 Found - the oldest star (11:41) Scientists recently measured the age of an old star in six independent ways, and concluded that it was the oldest known, about 13.2 billion years old. The report in Physorg doesn't give the interesting details about why this star has been stable so long, nor many details about the affiliation and funding of the investigators. What is really interesting is that I just mentioned a report on how dark matter may have snuffed out the early stars. I find the reconciliation of the "snuff" theory and the old star fun to watch. [/2007/05/31] permanent link Book: New Physics and the Mind (07:34) For people who like to read about physics theories, there are a bunch of excerpts from the book "New Physics and the Mind" on line. I haven't decided if I want to buy the book, the style becomes wordy, pretentious, and verbose at times, it would be a much smaller tome were I the editor; some paragraphs could be reduced, combined, or simply eliminated. In spite of that the science is interesting, so it make a good, if somewhat ponderous, read. [/2007/05/31] permanent link Wed, 30 May 2007 Tivo patents network-style protocol for hard drives (11:52) Tivo has been granted a US Patent, number 7216235, for a password locked disk drive which will send challenges to the host and require that the challenge be XORed with the lock key, and the response then be encrypted and sent back to the drive. And the drive will send other challenges to the host from time to time, to verify the authenticity of the key. This seems to have some of the characteristics of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, some of the ssh protocol2 repeated changing of the key (not clear if the data from the drive to the host is encrypted), and generally sounds like over-solving the problem by using a lot of proprietary hardware. It also seems to have little value over just encrypting the data on the drive in the first place. Perhaps the goal is not to protect anything, but rather to avoid having cheap large disk drives put in Tivo hardware without paying for a larger system.; Note that DVRs will use an external hard drive, but will encrypt the data on it. Sounds like a better solution to me. [/2007/05/30] permanent link Lab on a chip (06:21) NASA is developing a "lab on a chip" to test for and identify various types of bacteria which might infect a space ship. The goal in the next few years is to identify over a hundred common bacteria and some fungi. Tests are ongoing, on the ISS and in the arctic. [/2007/05/30] permanent link Tue, 29 May 2007 Virtual VISTA from VMware (08:18) VMware has released a new virtual environment for VISTA which runs on Linux or Windows. While I see it as a way to run VISTA without the security issues of having a physical Microsoft deployment, I suspect that people will see it as a way to run VISTA on their old Windows machines without an upgrade to the hardware. I could be misreading the announcement. This could be useful to Linux users who have the need to run some limited VISTA software, but who trust the native Linux firewalling capability more than the vendor VISTA firewall. The capability of 3rd parties firewalls and security software has been questioned, and some Microsoft features make the type of control over the network more difficult than it was with XP. [/2007/05/29] permanent link Sat, 26 May 2007 Solar powered cell phone from Motorola? (09:44) Motorola has patented a new method of embedding solar power capability into a display screen. This leads to the possibility of cell phones which charge themselves. Motorola also mentioned touch screen displays and organic LEDs in the patent. If a commercial product were actually available with this technology, it would probably appeal to more people than the iPhone, since more bells and whistles on a phone only adds marginal value, but a phone you don't have to remember to charge would have real appeal to many people. Motorola is looking for openings in the cell market, I believe. I'm still trying to get the "dumb phone" for my service. That's the Motorola phone which is just a phone with long battery life. No games, Internet, video, color, just a phone which will run a long time because it doesn't use power on non-voice frills. [/2007/05/26] permanent link Fri, 25 May 2007 The "State of FOSS" report (09:37) You can get a PDF report on the state of Open Source Software, as viewed by 100 commercial software companies, here. As Robert Burns (Scottish poet, 1759-1796) said, “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion” [/2007/05/25] permanent link Thu, 24 May 2007 Linux for audio (09:22) Keyboard magazine has published an article on using Linux for audio processing. It probably underestimates the technical capabilities of the reader, and feels as though the author is talking down to the audience, but it does point out the significant software available, and has a number of useful links. They failed to mention audacity, my own personal favorite for editing audio after capture. It allows a mix of visual and audible information to be easily used in an intuitive way to identify sections and modify them as desired. [/2007/05/24] permanent link Dark matter and the early universe (05:41) For physics enthusiasts, there's a report on the role of dark matter in the early universe. And the original paper is also available in PDF and the theoretically challenged can still get the sense of the paper by reading past all the math between conclusions. I followed some of it, but in several places I took their word for it as assumed "here a miracle occurs" and went on. [/2007/05/24] permanent link