The latest item in Google's shopping spree is Agnilux, a small and somewhat mysterious startup full of former Apple, TiVo, and P.A. Semi employees. Few details are available about the acquisition, but it looks like a good deal for Google. More »
LiveScience:
The Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, which began erupting on Wednesday, April 14, has been churning out volcanic ash that's electrified with lightning. Credit: Olivier Vandeginste.
Words, Words, Words ... NASA, NASA, NASA, Huffington Post
"So, listen up. Develop a sense of urgency and a respect for the benefits we gain from going to space ... without knowing what those benefits will be. Even if he knew precisely what was going to happen, how far would JFK have gotten had he described to Congress a world of cell phones and laptops, YouTube and Google, wireless and texting - for the seeds of all that technology trace directly back to the communications tech required for the Apollo program. Demanding usefulness as a precondition for any NASA budget is wrong-headed thinking; demanding cutting edge innovation, paradigm-shifting scientific, breakthrough technologies - that's the ticket! What will result will no doubt amaze and astound."
Would someone help me solve this problem? Below is a description of a partial circuit. How do you find the resistance looking into the drain of M1? The answer is: Resistance = ro1 (1 + gm1*ro5). Please draw the small signal model you used to get the answer and show all calculations. Thanks
NASA CIO Conducts A Web Experiment, Information Week
NASA CIO Linda Cureton has conducted an experiment in IT leadership via her blog on the space agency's Web site. Cureton wrote about online reputations, then she responded to every comment made by readers. Her conclusion: "Listening changes the listener." ... For the past two years, she has used her blog to write about leadership, innovation, and IT transformation, among other topics. "One of my reasons for blogging is to use this Web 2.0 capability as a leadership tool," Cureton wrote in her latest post, titled "The Connected CIO."
Experimental X-37B Robot Space Plane to Launch Thursday, Space.com
"The United States Air Force plans to launch its first robotic X-37B space plane Thursday on a mission that is a forerunner of things to come. A second mini-space plane is already under contract and is projected to be launched next year. New details regarding the mini-space plane and its upcoming Thursday liftoff atop an Atlas 5 booster were discussed today during a U.S. Air Force-held media press briefing."
Oh my! The folks at BGR have gotten their hands on a BlackBerry 9670. Apparently there'll be more details about the CDMA-based, clamshell device coming soon, but for now there are plenty of pictures to sift through. [BGR] More »
I recently reported on our use of Nature Precedings to archive different editions of the ONS Solubility Challenge book. One of the advantages is that Precedings automatically alerts visitors if more recent editions exist.
However, today I learned that there is a glitch to this system: it is not possible to link individual versions on Precedings to a corresponding book edition on LuLu. That means that if you find yourself on the Nature Precedings entry and want to order the book from LuLu it isn't obvious at all how to do so.
To resolve this issue once and for all I just created a wiki page (ONSbooks.wikispaces.com) to track every edition of the book. This is actually better because I can also provide links to all the available data archives and blog posts corresponding to each edition.
This is also the page where we will keep track of every edition of other Open Notebook Science books. The next one to be published shortly is for the UsefulChem project.
Any good sites or books on long-distance TV reception, say via tropo scatter? I'm trying to get stations 110 miles away.
Salvia divinorum: effects and use among YouTube users.
“Salvia divinorum (salvia) is an intense, short-acting hallucinogenic plant gaining popularity among adolescents in the United States. There has been little scientific documentation of salvia’s effects. The popular video-sharing website YouTube has received literally thousands of video-posts of people using salvia. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of salvia use through systematic observations of YouTube videos. A sample of salvia videos was obtained using the search term “salvia.” The videos were further screened and only videos that captured the entire drug “trip” without video edits were included in the analyses described here (n=34). Three trained research assistants independently watched the videos and rated their observations on 42 effects in 30-s intervals. Onset of symptoms was quick (often less than 30s) and tended to dissipate within 8min. Further, there was a relationship between salvia dose and effect duration. Since salvia’s effects on humans are largely undocumented, this study provides the look at users in a non-laboratory environment (e.g. self-taped videos) exhibiting impairments and behaviors consistent with this powerful hallucinogen. Also, this study demonstrates the feasibility and shortcomings of using YouTube videos to assess emerging drugs and drug effects.”
Image: YouTube/ShivihS
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Is that bee on crack? Oh, wait…it is.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Want your rat to get it on while high on ecstasy? Play loud music.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Pink Floyd hallucinations: not just for druggies.
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
They won't be terribly fast—they'll swim 59 feet per minute and crawl 98 feet per minute—and they'll cost $18 million to develop, but aquatic robots like this might one day aid underwater search and rescue efforts. More »
Apple's quarterly earnings reports provide a rare opportunity for financial analysts to publicly pose questions to Apple executives. Today, no one granted an audience asked about Apple's lost iPhone. More »
The HP Compaq Airlife 100 certainly looks pretty. But the more we find out about the specs, the more I'm doubting this first-wave smartbook. More »
We tried Autosync of an old diesel start gas plant with settings like 0.5 Hz/s characteristics, 0.25s pulse, 10s pulse interval for frequency control and it worked ok.
How different is a hydro plant in terms of settings? Could I use the same settings? We couldn't obtain the characteristics
I used to get 20 MPG with my little street rod, 350 SBC, 4bbl on a small blower, 2100lbs, 3.0 rear. Then the motor expired and I replaced it with a new GM crate 350, the 260 HP version. Now MPG is 10. I can't find any fuel leaks, the motor runs fine and the plugs look great. Any ideas what is go
Coal executives at the Hearing April 14th (click for more)
The Arctic, the far north, northern Canada and Alaska, are all seeing electric storms that have never been seen before.  Indigenous people in the far north have no words in their language for “lightning”.  The atmosphere has 5% more moisture in it than it had 40 years ago, which is leading to wild temperature changes and electrical storms in places where they didn’t used to occur — with varying and disturbing consequences. Birds are migrating out of sync, animals are going extinct at a rapid rate, we are burning through water and top soil like never before — our planet is in an obvious climate crisis right now.  Climate change keeps progressing, and desperate coal executives are seeing support for their industry begin to slip away (as it should). Last week there were fireworks over coal during hearings in Washington.
From Greenwire – Executives split on carbon caps, climate science
“A trio of executives from the world’s largest coal companies told Congress last week on April 14th that their industry is providing the fuel of the future [an insane claim] . . . . Under scrutiny from Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and other Democrats on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, — and under fire from protesters who briefly disrupted the hearing — top executives from Peabody Energy Corp., Arch Coal Inc. and Rio Tinto PLC all called coal an irreplaceable source of energy in the United States and abroad. They stood united on the need for federal support for carbon capture and storage technology that would prevent emissions from coal-fired power plants from entering the atmosphere.”
CCS (Carbon capture and sequestration) technology could be ready for commercial-scale use sometime in the 2020s, said Peabody CEO Greg Boyce.  [whether it will work or not is another thing entirely] But the consensus broke down over carbon regulation. Boyce blasted the House-passed energy and climate bill (H.R. 2454 (pdf)) that would put a price on carbon emissions. Congress should wait until carbon capture and storage technology is ready before it regulates carbon, said Boyce.”
Congressman Markey responded by saying that there will absolutely be a price put on carbon so they should cooperate and work with the Senate. We cannot wait years for carbon capture because climate change is progressing too quickly.  It will be 10-20 or more years until CCS works on a large scale.  If, as they claim, coal is “irreplaceable” what is their plan when it runs out? Like all fossil fuels, it’s finite. I guess they plan on manufacturing coal somehow, or perhaps blowing up more and more land in search of the coal that is hiding.
Unfortunately, these hearings were not advertised well, and there is no video either on the Select Committee hearing website or on C-SPAN. (Government transparency continues to fail us) . . .
On that [...]
Alas, MS got me again with a bad install.
New laptop, good & legal Office 2003, everything works except Outlook.
Message as follows:
Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook, MAP132.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version. This could be caused by installing other messaging software. Plea
And we’ve reached the final installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Chapter Fifteen is entitled “The Past Through Tomorrow,” in an oblique allusion to Robert Heinlein, my favorite author when I was younger. We’re going to throw in the Epilogue for good measure.
Excerpt:
What we’ve done is given the universe a way that it can increase its entropy without limit. In a de Sitter universe, space grows without bound, but the part of space that is visible to any one observer remains finite, and has a finite entropy—the area of the cosmological horizon. Within that space, the fields fluctuate at a fixed temperature that never changes. It’s an equilibrium configuration, with every process occurring equally as often as its time-reverse. Once baby universes are added to the game, the system is no longer in equilibrium, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as equilibrium. In the presence of a positive vacuum energy (according to this story), the entropy of the universe never reaches a maximum value and stays there, because there is no maximum value for the entropy of the universe—it can always increase, by creating new universes.
This is the chapter where we attempt to put it all together. The idea was that we had been so careful and thorough in the previous chapters that in this one we could be fairly terse, setting up ideas and knocking them down with our meticulously-prepared bludgeon of Science. I’m not sure if it actually worked that way; one could argue that it would have been more effective to linger lovingly over the implications of some of these scenarios. But there was already a lot of repetition throughout the book (intentionally, so that ideas remained clear), and I didn’t want to add to it.
Of course my own current favorite idea involves baby universes pinching off from a multiverse, and I’m certainly happy to explain my reasons in favor of it. But there are also good reasons to be skeptical, especially when it comes to our lack of knowledge concerning whether baby universes actually are formed in de Sitter space. What I hope comes across is the more generic scenario: a multiverse where entropy is increasing locally because it can always increase, and does so both toward the far past and the far future. While there’s obviously a lot of work to be done in filling in the details, I haven’t heard any other broad-stroke idea that sounds like a sensible dynamical origin for the arrow of time. (Which isn’t to say that one won’t come along tomorrow.)
Chapter 16 is the Epilogue, where I reflect on where we’ve been and what it all means. I talk a little about why thinking about the multiverse is a very respectable part of the scientific endeavor, and how we should think about the fact that we are a very tiny part of a very big cosmos. Finally, I wanted to quote the very last paragraph of text in the book, at the end of the Acknowledgments:
I’m the kind of person who grows restless working at home or in the office for too long, so I frequently gather up my physics books and papers and bring them to a restaurant or coffee shop for a change of venue. Almost inevitably, a stranger will ask me what it is I’m reading, and—rather than being repulsed by all the forbidding math and science—follow up with more questions about cosmology, quantum mechanics, the universe. At a pub in London, a bartender scribbled down the ISBN number of Scott Dodelson’s Modern Cosmology; at the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago, I got a free drink for explaining dark energy. I would like to thank every person who is not a scientist but maintains a sincere fascination with the inner workings of nature, and is willing to ask questions and mull over the answers. Thinking about the nature of time might not help us build better TV sets or lose weight without exercising, but we all share the same universe, and the urge to understand it is part of what makes us human.
Among those people who share a fascination with the inner workings of nature, I of course include people who regularly read this blog. So — thanks!
