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Google Talks Transparency, But Hides Surveillance Stats
From Wired Top Stories:
Google likes to trumpet transparency and free expression, especially when it concerns the internet, part of its commitment to the corporate motto, "Don't Be Evil." But despite the company's recent online public policy posts espousing unfettered online exp
Some Airborne Particles Pose More Dangers Than Others
From Scientific American:
Mort Lippmann noticed a strange phenomenon in his laboratory mice. For 14 straight days, their hearts were racing. Lippmann, a scientist at New York University who has studied the effects of air pollution for over 50 years, couldn't explain it. During t
Where Candy Canes Come From
From mental_floss Blog:
One year when I was very young, my mother took me to see Santa Claus at Miller's department store in Knoxville. They had a candy cane factory set up in the middle of the sales floor! While we kids waited in line to see Santa, we could watch through the glass
$7.4 Billion in Stimulus Projects to Extend Broadband to Poor and Rural Areas
From Wash Post Technology:
The Obama administration named 18 projects Thursday that would receive a portion of the $7.4 billion in stimulus funds set aside to bring high-speed Internet to poor and rural areas that have been overlooked by Internet service providers.
Read t
Flare gas sensing
I'd like to be able to sense and identify gas types in real time in a well test flare. Calorimeters or GC's are slow, bulky, and cost prohibitive. Single transmitter units limit me to either combustibles or toxics and generally only one gas type at a time. Any ideas?
An Electric Car for Every Garage?
Instead of tailoring electric vehicles (EVs) to meet driving needs of large consumer segments, automakers should design plug-in EVs that meet some needs of some consumers. One consulting firm advocates a shift to mission-specific vehicles, such as for commuting. These would require higher energy sto
3D Displays for Mobile Devices?
A handful of companies are perfecting the technology to bring no-glasses-needed 3D displays to cell phones and other mobile devices. While the technology itself is impressive, applications beyond movies and entertainment are just waiting in the wings. What other types of applications do you think co
Relay
Sir I want to know the advantage of using pilotwire protection relay & supervision equipment relay & SPAJ Relay in a substation in HT Switchgear panel.
Steam Turbine Inlet Flanges
my dear I have a steam turbine having two inlet connections from top one from left and one from right of machine flange are raised face we are using spiral wound {flexitelic } gasket 8" 1500 psig when we start the machine after any shut down {thermal shock} minor steam leakage appears from
Measuring Capacity of a Loadcell
Halo everybody
I'ld like to know about the total weight measuring capacity of a loadcell.
That means if a loadcell is having a capacity of say around 10Tonnes, then is it including Tare or Gross weight? Means is it capable of measuring total 10T weight?
Or if it is mounted
Spaceport America developments
Will Spaceport America get a second paved access road? Right now the primary access is from the north, via the town of Truth or Consequences, on a road paved earlier this year to permit spaceport construction to again. That results in a fairly roundabout trip for visitors coming from Las Cruces and points south: about 90 minutes from Las Cruces. Earlier this week the New Mexico Spaceport Authority said it seek $7.5 million from the state to pave a second road that runs from I-25 at Upham, NM north to the spaceport. If paved, the 26-mile (42-kilometer) route could cut travel time from Las Cruces to the spaceport in half. Funds for the paving were authorized by the state legislature in 2006 as part of the overall spaceport project, but not funded.
Later this week, though, state officials backtracked: Fred Mondragón, head of the state’s Economic Development Department and chairman of the spaceport authority, said they would not seek state funds for the road because of a projected budget shortfall that’s expected to sharply limit capital expenditures in the state. Instead, he said that they will look for federal money for the road, or try to find savings from other parts of the overall project to get the road paved.
Mondragón also said the spaceport authority will seek legislation next year that would provide a liability indemnification for space tourism operators in the state, similar to existing legislation in Virginia, Florida, and most recently, Texas. The bill would not protect operators from gross negligence but would provide some protection in the event of accidents, and thus reduce insurance premiums for operators like Virgin Galactic. A similar bill was proposed in 2009 but not approved by legislators, concerned that it provided too much protection to operators; the 2010 version will be scaled back, although the report wasn’t specific as to how.
Level SENSOR
Hi...........
What are the high accuracy Level Sensor available for the LIQUID AND GAS (ETHYL MERCAPTAIN ) LEVEL MEASUREMENT.
Regards
Bharat NARAYAN
medium voltage and low voltage ducts
Dear All;
i have design issue with MV(13kV) and LV (480kV), for cost saving i tried to put mv and lv in same duct banks ( MV bottom layer)
and i checked NEC, i couldnt find any info about segregation of MV and LV underground installation.
all replies will be appriciated
Barney Frank and I Agree on Something
Over the objections of gambling opponents in Congress, the Obama administration has granted a request by US Representative Barney Frank to delay a long-scheduled federal crackdown on illegal Internet poker and casino sites.
Frank sought the six-month reprieve so he could keep working on a pet issue: legalizing online gambling.
The best part of the story is this:
You won’t find the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee at a poker table or roulette wheel, as Frank doesn’t gamble. But he said he does not want the government telling people what to do with their own money.
Frank (who happens to be my congressman) is absolutely right about this. Too bad he does not want to let people keep more their own money in the first place.
Communists greet Obama in Copenhagen
With Flags Wavin'
As Obama arrived in Copenhagen yesterday for the Global Warming Summit, tens of thousands of Communists and Socialists flooded the streets to demonstrate for greater government control over the individual and more interventionist policies in Economics.
One sign read:
"As Karl Marx would say: It's the Capitalism Stupid"
(H/t Breitbart)
Accelerating Pads
hai dear gentleman's around here ...i have a thought about accelerating pads i mean a moving pad which could help peoples in more rushing areas like in airport or at railway stations etc.,instead of using escalators which are relatively slow in speed my concept of arranging fast moving flat pads so
Climate Warmer launches direct Assault on Individualism
"it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class... we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot... when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care...
John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness." -- Candidate Barack Hussein Obama, Oct. 31, 2008, Sarasota, FL
by Eric Dondero
Copenhagen is at least succeeding at accomplishing one objective of the worldwide libertarian/free market movement; it's sharpening the lines between those of us who support freedom and those who do not.
Robert Tracinski of Real Clear Politics writes this morning that British global warming activist George Monbiot "has just written probably the single most important column on the issue."
From the UK Guardian, "Bigger than Climate Change: A Battle to Redefine Humanity," by George Monbiot:
This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.
The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won... If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity...
Tracinski responds in a column at Yahoo News, "Capping our Carbon, and Crushing our Spirits":
Monbiot is right about the big question, even if he's on the wrong side of it. The goal of the environmentalist movement is not anything so trivial as capping our carbon. It's about crushing our spirits. It's about breaking the ambition of man the achiever-the explorer, the adventurer, the discoverer, the builder-and replacing him with man the meek, a modest little paper-shuffler constrained to live a small, inoffensive existence.
Make man feel small. Make man feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity....
This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living.... Bring them to a state where saying "I want" is no longer a natural right but a shameful admission....
Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There's equality in stagnation.
People say Ayn Rand's novels are unrealistic, so why does real life seem so compelled to imitate them? Monbiot even has the kind of last name Ayn Rand would have given one of her villains. Ellsworth Toohey, Wesley Mouch, Claude Slagenhop, George Monbiot. It just fits in.
Monbiot got one thing spectacularly wrong; it is those of us on the Capitalist Right, especially those of us involved in the Tea Party movmement, who are the true Grass Roots, not the Communists who control Governments around the Globe and their government-subsidized protesters in the Labor movement.
But he did get at least one thing right: We Proud Capitalists "will cross any line," to protect our Individual Freedoms, even if it means the fight will get real ugly. Bring it on!
Sunlight Glint Confirms Liquid in Titan Lake Zone
NASA's Cassini Spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn's moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins.
Cassini scientists had been looking for the glint, also known as a specular reflection, since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn in 2004. But Titan's northern hemisphere, which has more lakes than the southern hemisphere, has been veiled in winter darkness. The sun only began to directly illuminate the northern lakes recently as it approached the equinox of August 2009, the start of spring in the northern hemisphere. Titan's hazy atmosphere also blocked out reflections of sunlight in most wavelengths. This serendipitous image was captured on July 8, 2009, using Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer.
The new infrared image is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.
This image will be presented Friday, Dec. 18, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
"This one image communicates so much about Titan -- thick atmosphere, surface lakes and an otherworldliness," said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It's an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth. This picture is one of Cassini's iconic images."
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has captivated scientists because of its many similarities to Earth. Scientists have theorized for 20 years that Titan's cold surface hosts seas or lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only other planetary body besides Earth believed to harbor liquid on its surface. While data from Cassini have not indicated any vast seas, they have revealed large lakes near Titan's north and south poles.
In 2008, Cassini scientists using infrared data confirmed the presence of liquid in Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in Titan's southern hemisphere. But they were still looking for the smoking gun to confirm liquid in the northern hemisphere, where lakes are also larger.
Katrin Stephan, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, an associate member of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, was processing the initial image and was the first to see the glint on July 10th.
"I was instantly excited because the glint reminded me of an image of our own planet taken from orbit around Earth, showing a reflection of sunlight on an ocean," Stephan said. "But we also had to do more work to make sure the glint we were seeing wasn't lightning or an erupting volcano."
Team members at the University of Arizona, Tucson, processed the image further, and scientists were able to compare the new image to radar and near-infrared-light images acquired from 2006 to 2008.
They were able to correlate the reflection to the southern shoreline of a lake called Kraken Mare. The sprawling Kraken Mare covers about 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), an area larger than the Caspian Sea, the largest lake on Earth. It is located around 71 degrees north latitude and 337 degrees west latitude.
The finding shows that the shoreline of Kraken Mare has been stable over the last three years and that Titan has an ongoing hydrological cycle that brings liquids to the surface, said Ralf Jaumann, a visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team member who leads the scientists at the DLR who work on Cassini. Of course, in this case, the liquid in the hydrological cycle is methane rather than water, as it is on Earth.
"These results remind us how unique Titan is in the solar system," Jaumann said. "But they also show us that liquid has a universal power to shape geological surfaces in the same way, no matter what the liquid is."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
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Supernova Explosions Stay in Shape
At a very early age, children learn how to classify objects according to their shape. Now, new research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas may allow astronomers to do the same.
A new study of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants -- the debris from exploded stars - shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed.
"It's almost like the supernova remnants have a 'memory' of the original explosion," said Laura Lopez of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who led the study. "This is the first time anyone has systematically compared the shape of these remnants in X-rays in this way."
Astronomers sort supernovas into several categories, or "types," based on properties observed days after the explosion and which reflect very different physical mechanisms that cause stars to explode. But, since observed remnants of supernovas are leftover from explosions that occurred long ago, other methods are needed to accurately classify the original supernovas.
Lopez and colleagues focused on the relatively young supernova remnants that exhibited strong X-ray emission from silicon ejected by the explosion so as to rule out the effects of interstellar matter surrounding the explosion. Their analysis showed that the X-ray images of the ejecta can be used to identify the way the star exploded. The team studied 17 supernova remnants both in the Milky Way galaxy and a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
For each of these remnants there is independent information about the type of supernova involved, based not on the shape of the remnant but, for example, on the elements observed in it. The researchers found that one type of supernova explosion -- the so-called Type Ia -- left behind relatively symmetric, circular remnants. This type of supernova is thought to be caused by a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf, and is often used by astronomers as "standard candles" for measuring cosmic distances.
On the other hand, the remnants tied to the "core-collapse" supernova explosions were distinctly more asymmetric. This type of supernova occurs when a very massive, young star collapses onto itself and then explodes.
"If we can link supernova remnants with the type of explosion," said co-author Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, also of University of California, Santa Cruz, "then we can use that information in theoretical models to really help us nail down the details of how the supernovas went off."
Models of core-collapse supernovas must include a way to reproduce the asymmetries measured in this work and models of Type Ia supernovas must produce the symmetric, circular remnants that have been observed.
Out of the 17 supernova remnants sampled, ten were classified as the core-collapse variety, while the remaining seven of them were classified as Type Ia. One of these, a remnant known as SNR 0548-70.4, was a bit of an "oddball." This one was considered a Type Ia based on its chemical abundances, but Lopez finds it has the asymmetry of a core-collapse remnant.
"We do have one mysterious object, but we think that is probably a Type Ia with an unusual orientation to our line of sight," said Lopez. "But we'll definitely be looking at that one again."
While the supernova remnants in the Lopez sample were taken from the Milky Way and its close neighbor, it is possible this technique could be extended to remnants at even greater distances. For example, large, bright supernova remnants in the galaxy M33 could be included in future studies to determine the types of supernova that generated them.
The paper describing these results appeared in the November 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
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