Year: 2007

To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight

To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for FlightI received this audiobook as a gift for Christmas and it took me a little while before I screwed up the desire to listen to it. I have a lot of podcasts and other audiobooks vying for my attention and don’t want to spend time with things that aren’t really interesting to me.I was pleasantly surprised. Like most Americans I was pretty ignorant of many of the details surrounding not only the Wright brother’s landmark powered flight, but also around their attempts to market the idea in their own country.
The infamous Kittyhawk flight is at about the middle of the book. I had rather assumed that it was a fait a complete, that once they had proven their technology the rest was as easy as pie. But nothing could be further from the truth.
A very worthwhile read / listen if you have any interest at all in the social politics behind one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century.

Some Bicycle thoughts

My friend King sent this and I thought it was pretty interesting.

— From King —

If you don’t like the first link, give-up on the rest because they are all
on the same topic.

http://www.econvergence.net/electro.htm

http://www.windstreampower.com/humanpower/ppg.html

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-03-11-voa14.cfm

http://www.gulland.ca/homenergy/lindabike.htm

http://users.erols.com/mshaver/bikegen.htm

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_experiments_bicycle.html

http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=question658.htm&url=http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~et181/hpv/hpv.html

— End From King —

I was biting my tongue when I saw the “average person can generate 150 to 200 watts of power” in that first article. Maybe if you set them on fire…

One of the later articles was talking about 50 watts which made MUCH more sense. My exercycle has a “watts” reading and, if it’s at all accurate, 200 watts is a LOT of exertion.

I recall at the Science center that you could watch yourself on that TV, I was never 100% sure how much you were powering, was it just the TV or was it the TV camera as well? With modern LCD panels and cool new CCD technology I imagine it would take a lot less effort now, but even the most stalwart pedaler would only last in the 10’s of seconds.

It’s a neat idea, I don’t think many of those “green” suggestions (the cool bikes in the later articles) are ever going to be to practical in our weather region. We’ve mentally (socially) evolved beyond the desire to get soaked or frozen trying to get to work.

Heck, even car pools seem to be an impossibility nowadays, especially with flex hours and whatnot.

Congress looking to ban incandescent light bulbs

If we could reinstate a body to advise congress on matters scientific, so that our lawmakers could have some other point of view besides those provided by pollsters and special interest lobbyists, I believe we would have far fewer of this kind of ill-conceived bill winding its way through congress

The Office of Technology Assessment (click here to read a nice summary of their existence) was just such a body. Without their guidance, our congress is almost entirely a bunch of Political Science / History/ Legal Majors with no background upon which to understand some of the most critical issues of our day. Everything from DMCA* to why it’s an idiotic idea to move the DST around to save energy.

This article, American Thinker- Ban the Bulb?, regarding a proposal to ban incandescent bulbs amazes me not only because of the technical irrelevance of the move, but also from the fact that all those history majors in congress do not recognize the historical trend that should even be obvious to the Luddites that claim to represent our best interests.

Beyond the issues that the above article raises, it is commonplace for technological innovations to *increase* energy consumption rather than decrease it. Be it for sociological reasons (the new bulbs are cheaper to run so I can just leave them on all the time) or technological reasons (Hey! Here’s a use for these bulbs that I wouldn’t have even considered with the old bulbs!) that drive a new demand and hence greater energy consumption.

Check out my blog entry about a book VERY relevant to this discussion and see what I mean.

*DMCA = Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Terribly short sighted legislation

It’s odd what we get used to

Everybody knows that you really shouldn’t toss your litter out on the street. I mean, how hard is it to just put it on your pocket or hang on to it until you see a convenient garbage can.

Yet smokers think nothing of tossing their butts out their windows or casually flicking them onto the sidewalk. Even worse, when they have a full ashtray, they seem to have little compunction about simply dumping the whole mess for others to have to step over or otherwise deal with.

While I think this is probably not the best solution, I did smile when I read this.

CTV.ca | Montreal’s ‘Cigarette Butt Hero’ gains YouTube fame

If the article is no longer available, hopefully you can see the YouTube video:

“Currently Reading” items in the sidebar

In case you’re wondering if I have just simply forgotten the books over there. It actually does take quite a while for me to get through my books. About the only time I have to read is at night in bed just before going to sleep. I’m lucky if I can polish of 20 pages of a good novel on any given night.

And, of course, some of the drier science-fact items will take even longer than that.

Right now I’m deliberately reveling in “Judas Unchained” – I’m not going out of my way to read it very fast as I’m intent on stretching out the enjoyment for as long as I can. Mind you, at 1,234 pages it was bound to take a while in the first place.

Of course I don’t record any of the minor items that I read – Reader’s Digest, AOPA’s great magazine and the tremendous amount of information I get off of the Internet each day.

The “Suddenly Silver” – For Better or For Worse book has a lot of flashback items so is only partially interesting to me as I’ve read a LOT of the stuff before. I’ll probably just knock it off over the next week.

NASA zero-g experiments with water and air

It’s staggering how localized our experiences are in the context of the universe. Our expectations and perceptual experiences are so contingent on the Earth’s milieu that anything else seems far-fetched and surreal (which, I suppose, it is…).

I believe that a lot of the moon hoax proponents suffer from this as well. Certainly anybody creating science fiction movies has to cater to this somewhat limited view of reality.

2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the very few movies to try to express off-earth experience in a fairly realistic way. Space is… well… slow, quiet and inexorable. But it is also staggeringly fascinating and provides opportunities for artistic and inventive creativity that we can still only dimly grasp.

In this clip below from YouTube, the water droplets bouncing around inside an air bubble inside a larger water sphere offer a hint of this potential. The Antacid tablet in a water sphere following that is just simply cool. 🙂

Alarm issues with Compaq iPAQ 3955

** Update 2007-03-30 **  Just had an alarm that was supposed to go off at 7:30 pm this morning go off at 7:30 am. Checked the iPAQ  clock and see that it’s set correctly. Still gathering clues..
** end update **

I’ve had this unit for a little over 4 and a half years and it’s performed admirably for all that time. Screen is still great and battery life is still wonderful.

When the useless 2007 DST change hit I went out and found a fix on the HP site to apply that was supposed to help. What it did was correct the time on my unit but messed up every single appointment in the 3 week period between the old and new DST start dates. Fortunately I didn’t have anything scheduled in November so that won’t be an issue. I ended up manually readjusting all my entries for the affected period. The worst was the “all day events” since they bled forward a day and ended up spanning two days.

Now I’m *pretty* sure that my alarms were working after that patch. A couple of days ago I noticed that my alarms were no longer going off. Not just not sounding, but nothing –  no alert on the screen, no sound and no power light flashing.

The only change that I recall making was about a week or so ago I changed the flashing powerlight option to be “infinite” instead of whatever it was before (just flash for 10 or 15 minutes).

Today I realized that my alarms were awry so I went and changed the powerlight setting back to 10 minutes and created some test meetings. The ONLY thing that happens now is that the powerlight begins to flash. Still no screen alert or audible alarm. This makes me think that there is a bug that I’ve somehow triggered by changing this setting in the first place.

Of course I’ve reset the unit but I haven’t taken any major action yet. Also sound is working fine, I can manually play the alarm sound and it sounds great. In the settings I’ve indicated that I only want sounds for notifications and the like. It’s been like that for ages. Anybody out there who has some suggestions or ideas I’d like to hear from you.