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 »
HP Compaq Airlife 100 Smartbook Specs Outed [Smartbooks]
Autosynchronization of Hydro Plant
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
Mileage Went From 20 to 10 With New Motor…Why?!
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
Fireworks over Coal While the Climate Crisis Progresses
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 [...]
Missing DLL
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
From Eternity to Book Club: Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen | Cosmic Variance
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!
Carnival of Space #149 | Bad Astronomy
The Carnival of Space # 149 is up at Starry Critters, and you can catch up with the best astronomy and space bloggy goodness of the past week there. And if you go now, you’ll win a pony*.
*Offer not valid in The Local Group.
Style supporting the troops – The Weekender
 The Weekender | Style supporting the troops The Weekender Have a particular message in mind? Upload your own and start showing your support of loved ones, neighbors, friends or the military in general. ... |
Einstein Rings – A Distortion Predicted A Century Ago
When you first look at it, you think it might be a flaw in the image. After studying it for a while, you realize it proves the existence of black holes, dark matter, and the warping of the fabric of space.
Light Warping Around Mass - NASA/ESA
The ring-like distortion effect on an image you see in gravitational lensing is referred to as Einstein Rings, mostly because Einstein predicted and quantified their existence in 1912. We’ve talked about gravitational lensing before, specifically in this post discussion on gravitational lensing used to prove the existence of dark matter.
What basically happens is that as light travels toward you, if there is something of respectable mass between you and the light source, the light will bend around it in response to its gravity. Science realized that sometimes they were looking at light bending around something they couldn’t see. Something of extremely large mass.
Light waves, left alone, will travel in a straight path away from its source. It doesn’t bend and warp on its own, but it will warp around a body of mass large enough to act on it. We see that as a distortion in the image. There are several different types of distortion we will see, and an Einstein Ring is just one. The Ring occurs when the mass source lines up “perfectly” between us and the light source. The more complete the Ring, the more “perfect” the line up. The Hubble Space Telescope found the first complete Ring in 1998.
If you like it mathematically, this is what it looks like geometrically:
Image released to public domain - author discourages attribution
It’s been almost a century since Einstein first predicted this effect. Using the Hubble ST to map the known Rings, science has reached a clearer understanding of the distribution of dark matter and energy around us, the nature of galaxies as distant as 11 bly, and the curvature of the known universe. I think that’s pretty amazing.
The Fairy Scientist | The Intersection
Kate and Miriam brought this terrific young explorer to my attention--and I have a hunch we'll hear more from Fairy Scientist Lydia in another decade or so! The details:
The Fairy Scientist was one of 9 finalists in the annual Project Reason Video contest. Voting is now closed and our little scientist did not win any of the three grand prizes. Oh well, the Nobel is still up for grabs. Children are natural scientists - filled with wonder and curiosity, they yearn to know about the world around them. Join Fairy Scientist, Lydia as she sets out to discover the secret world of Fairies. Lydia comes from a family of accomplished scientists; her grandfather is a PhD Oceanographer with NOAA and her great-grandfather is professor emeritus of Horticulture at Oregon State University. Lydia's father is an Electrical Engineer with Hewlett-Packard with numerous patents to his credit. Scientist, Lydia, is the granddaughter of "Andrus" producer/director, Robert Neary. Though she took a little direction from her director grandfather, her comments and observations are completely unscripted and entirely her own. Lydia's academic studies has her currently in the First Grade, but her inquisitiveness and curiosity show great promise in her achieving a notable scientific career.
Quantum Cryptography Improves by Factor of 100; Ready for Primetime? | 80beats
A quantum-encrypted future is a step closer this week after researchers announced a great advancement in speed: from fast enough to encrypt voice transmissions to fast enough to encrypt video.
For decades now scientists have tried to develop reliable quantum cryptography systems that take advantage of the quirks of quantum mechanics. Thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, we know that you can’t measure a photon of light without altering it. Thus, the thinking goes, if you encode information into photons of light, no hacker could intercept the information without giving themselves away. In 2008, we covered the scientists who orchestrated a secure video conference by using a quantum key, a security key derived from the patterns of arriving photons. Now, the Toshiba Research Lab in Cambridge [England] has reported a secure bit rate of 1 MB/sec, which is over 100 times better than previously achieved, making it suitable for commercial application [Nature]. The team outlines this research in Applied Physics Letters.
Research leader Andrew Shields says the key to this advance in quantum key distribution (QKD) is the marvelously named “semiconductor avalanche photodiodes,” in which a photon hits a bit of semiconductor to trigger an “avalanche” of electric charge. It takes time for that avalanche to build and pass, which limits the detector’s rate. New photodiodes can sense smaller avalanches and, hence, run faster, Shields says [ScienceNOW]. There’s also a stabilization system to adjust for the fiber-optic cables heating up.
The encryption method is considered to be perfect because it uses extremely long encryption keys only once and so cannot be cracked using crypto-analysis [Computer Weekly]. That big claim will be put to the test in October in Japan, when a quantum key distribution demonstrator will test the secure key across a wider “metropolitan network”, which may ultimately lead to the technology becoming commercially available [Wired.co.uk]. Someday many scientists hope to expand to an entire computer network employing quantum mechanics, including the possibility of messages encrypted with quantum entanglement. But now that researchers are surmounting some of the technical challenges, the next problem is, naturally, cost.
Related Content:
80beats: Quantum Cryptography Takes a Step Toward Mainstream Use
80beats: Harnessing Quantum Weirdness To Make Spy-Proof Email
DISCOVER: Future Tech: The quantum cryptography race is on
Image: iStockphoto
Apple’s Single Mention of New iPhone Hardware [Blockquote]
Apple's only mention of any kind of new iPhone hardware (besides the letter they sent us), and mentions of "future product transitions" during its live earnings call: Apple COO Tim Cook made a single reference to "new hardware" for the iPhone. More »
Well, Selling the Most iPhones Ever Made Apple a Lot of Money [Apple]
Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones in the last three months. That's over double what they did a year ago—the most quarterly ever—and how Apple nearly doubled profits: Up 90 percent for their best ever non-Christmas quarter. Updated live. More »
Problem with ceg ups
what's the common problem in the ceg ups?
OMG! Study Sez Teen Textng’s Totally Up :0 | Discoblog
In today’s not-shocking news, researchers have determined that teenagers like to text–a lot.
The new study by the Pew Center shows that the mobile phone has become the preferred mode of communication for American teens, with one in three teens sending more than 100 texts a day. Also in the category of not-shocking, the researchers found that older teenage girls are the most enthusiastic texters.
Some of the key findings:
- The study points out that cell phone ownership among 12- to 17-year-olds has spiked, going up from 45 percent in 2004 to 75 percent this year.
- With cell phones at their disposal, the teens were also more likely to text than call, although the majority still turned to an old-fashioned phone call when it came time to communicate with mom and dad.
- Half of the teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three sends more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month.
- Older girls who text are the most active, with 14- to 17-year-old girls typically sending 100 or more messages a day or more than 3,000 texts a month.
When the teens aren’t texting, they report using their cell phones to listen to music and to take and share pictures with their friends. A whopping 83 percent used their phones’ cameras, but a relatively small number of teens said they sent and received sexually suggestive images by text (”sexts”). Just 4 percent of teens say they have sent a sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude image of themselves via text message, with older teens more like to receive “sexts” than younger ones.
If this study is making your nervous about your teen’s texting behavior–then you’re not alone. The study found that 64 percent of all parents snoop around on their kids’ cell phones and more than half have taken the device away to punish a child.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Who Has Dumber Fans, Ashton Kutcher or Justin Bieber? Math Reveals the Answer…
Discoblog: Teen Sues Mom for Hacking His Facebook Account
Discoblog: Teen Tries a Walkman for the First Time; Takes 3 Days to Find Side B
Discoblog: New Villain in the Obesity Epidemic: Mean Gym Teachers
Image: Wikipedia
Short circuit protection for UPS
For many software and Data centre installations predominantly UPS supply is used .
How to arrive the short circuit MVA at the output bus of UPS,given the kva rating and output voltage of UPS.
What is the basis of protection coordination.
Please enlighten on this
advance thanks f
Apple Didn’t Leak the iPhone—and Why That Matters [Apple]
A controlled leak? The lost iPhone planted by Apple? You have no idea how Apple PR works—and how, like it or not, Gizmodo finally beat them at their own game. More »
Update: How Bad is Bad? It Used to Be $.45 on the Medical Insurance Dollar
Same billing codes. One month ago.
If you thought $.45 on the dollar was bad… well, now it’s $.20. I posted this just in case you thought “oh, maybe Cigna had a good reason to not cover your service.”
And why does Cigna not pay us? Oh, I’m sure it’s somehow “our fault.” I’m sure I could spend two hours fighting on the phone, fax, and snowmail to learn nothing about why we’re not getting paid.
Hey, did you see? They have a website! All I need to do is fax their registration form, and they’ll send a “team of healthcare representatives,” to “install” their website on my computers, and then I can learn why their not paying me in Internet Explorer 6 via a Java plugin which doesn’t work on their usually broken website exactly as slowly as receiving Cigna’s snowmail! Aren’t computers great?
I guess we didn’t study hard enough to make the Cigna grade this time. I guess we’ll just have to Try Harder. Will I be able to bare the shame of not meeting my obligations as a loved and trusted member of the Cigna family? No. Also, it’s almost certainly a violation of “contracts” and “HIPPA” (misspelled, of course) to post this sentiment and these bills on a public website.
How to Keep Commenting While Our Servers Melt [Announcements]
The interest in the tale of Apple's next iPhone is melting our servers and causing some technical difficulties. As a result, we had to temporarily shut off our comments system. More »
Project Natal Appears In the Wild [Natal]
Oh hello, pretty. This appears to be Microsoft's upcoming Project Natal, complete with instructions, as seen by someone hired to test its speech recognition. More »
