Diane Trout

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:13:29 GMT

Apparently I created a monster of rock.

Global warming update

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:10:04 GMT

There are a couple major studies released in the current issue of Nature.

High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present Figure 1 shows concentrations for 650,000 to 800,000 years ago, the the values for CO2 concentration ranges from 180 ppm to 260ppm (We're currently at ~380 ppm).

Figure 2 shows a strong correlation between global temperature and CO2 levels.

And this "Web Focus" for the EPICA project (which produced the above paper) seems to be freely available.

Another study, Warming world altering thousands of natural systems, has found:

Most (about 90% of the >29,500 data series, P << 0.001) changes in these systems at the global scale have been in the direction expected as a response to warming. Ninety-five per cent of the 829 documented physical changes have been in directions consistent with warming, such as glacier wastage and an earlier spring peak of river discharge. For biological systems, 90% of the approx 28,800 documented changes in plants and animals are responding consistently to temperature changes (mostly by means of earlier blooming, leaf unfolding and spring arrival).

Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change,
Cynthia Rosenzweig, et.al. Nature 453, 353-357 (15 May 2008)

Those are changes that have been documented since 1970. Global Warming is real, it is happening right now, and we need to deal with it Now.

(Alas the second paper may not be freely available.)

Getting Gold Farmers out of WoW

Tue, 13 May 2008 07:33:27 GMT

I had an odd idea of how to get chinese gold farmers out of the north american edition of world of warcraft.

Code up some wiki-like software that works via the in game whisper or chat system and fill it with pro-democracy/anti-chinese state content. Then the chinese firewall will block them.

Whispering certain unapproved chinese terms to farmers who are spamming might also get them blocked by the chinese firewall, and probably be easier to do.

So does anyone know some forbidden words that could be easily kept at the ready?

GH

Mon, 12 May 2008 06:08:48 GMT

Yesterday, dragonblink and I went to markcronan's birthday. Toward the end of the festivities we played a bit of Guitar Hero for the wii.

Today I went and picked up a couple of games for our wii. I got to play Boom Blox (a physics puzzle game) for a bit before Dragonblink took over the wii for our copy of guitar hero.

She's been going for quite a few hours.

Also unlike most of the people we saw play yesterday, she really gets into and starts dancing along while she plays.

I wonder if her hand will work tomorrow.

Telemarketer tar baby

Wed, 07 May 2008 20:32:24 GMT

I just got a phone call from some telemarketing company on my work line, they were doing the traditional robot says "hi, I have an important message for you, press 1 to talk to an operator".

Since I've gotten calls from these pests before, I decided to hit 1 and leave the phone off the hook.

However I just had a brilliant idea. It would be really cool to implement an interactive voice response system that behaves like a confused person interested in their product. Thus when you got an annoying telemarketer call you could transfer them to this bot and let the bot slow down how many people they can annoy.

Jim Woolsey, The Need for Energy Independence

Wed, 07 May 2008 06:52:09 GMT

Caltech hosted a talk by Jim Woolsey, former director of the CIA on The Need for Energy Independence.

The thrust of his talk was that we now face two "existential" threats, that of climate change and islamist terrorism, which could be described as malignant and malevolent.

He used the analogy of smoking 5 packs of cigarettes per day to represent the unknown "malignant" danger of climate change. It's hard to predict exactly when things might break, especially since there are events that could trigger exponential increases in greenhouse gases. (For instance if we warm above some threshold, the polar tundra will melt, releasing methane which is a potent GHG, which will warm the tundra more, releasing more GHG.)

Thus since the consequences are so severe for not addressing climate change we should do something about it.

Except there's this other problem, that of terrorism. Unfortunately for us, our energy infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to attack. The electrical grid could be fairly easily disrupted by a determined attacker. However our oil supply is even worse off as it is currently under attack by determined groups. Al Qaeda is attempting to attack Saudi oil production which if they succeed will dramatically spike world oil prices.

He also described how most of those loans from China we're needing to keep our economy afloat are so we can continue to buy oil, suggesting if we dealt with our energy dependence our economy would be in vastly better shape.

His plan included increase energy efficiency in businesses, use combined heating/power generation, roll out plug-in hybrids that run on multiple fuel types, build more renewable power plants, manufacture biofuels, and then make up the difference with liquified coal.

I'm not sure how bad liquified coal would be after all the other changes in the transportation fuel mix, but it might be worth it temporarily so we can stop giving crazy people large chunks of money.

He also referenced a Brookings Institute paper on Energy Security,

Business travel

Mon, 05 May 2008 03:47:57 GMT

Last friday I got sucked into another stupid day-trip to Stanford, we were scheduled to flying out at 7am and get back at 10pm.

For a warm up I sent an email to my boss saying, no air travel is not good because of its proportionally large personal green house gas emissions, not that helped me get out of it.

So my day started bright and early at 5am, I drove over to caltech and picked up 2 more coworkers, we then drove over picked up the fourth on the way. Once we landed, B said he was going to come back on sunday so he could spend time with his family.

Later during the day, an announcement that we'd gotten scooped came out, and so we lost another to staying up at stanford to finish off their paper.

J and I tried to make our way back to the air port, and we showed up just as the jetway to the 7pm flight was pulling back. We were about to give up and wait for the 9pm flight, when the ticket agent told us that flight was delayed until 10.30p. But if we wanted to we could fly back to a different LA area airport.

He called his wife, and they decided she could pick us up from LAX, so we hopped on the flight, sat around LAX for a while, took the long way around LA to go drop me off at my car back at burbank.

Where I finally got to start driving home at 10pm, alone. Yep, I lost every one of my 3 coworkers along the way.

Saturday I spent the last half of the day in bed with a splitting headache, I suspect from dehydration from that stupid trip.

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:40:45 GMT

Thanks to google earth, the kml export of CONUS MODIS and the LA Times, I figured out that we're about 2.5 miles away from the Sierra Madre fire. We're only about 2 miles from the closest point in the evacuation zone.

Chantry Flat Fire Update

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:36:06 GMT

The Foothill Cities Blog has more information on the fire I called the Chantry Flat fire and they're calling the Fire in Arcadia/Sierra Madre Area. If you look around in the linked blog post there's several good flickr pools.

2008 Chantry Flat Fire

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 05:04:02 GMT

There's a fire at chantry flats in the hills above our apartment, there's not much information online that I could find. I'll periodically update the set.

Taxes

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:15:51 GMT

I was recently reading carbontax.org which is promoting a revenue-neutral tax to be applied to the emission of carbon into the atmosphere. To keep people from being over-taxed their plan lowers other taxes as the carbon tax increases.

It occurred to me that this is an interesting model for taxation, instead of sales or income, the state, representing the interests of the whole, could insert charges for ecosystem services to keep usage within sustainable limits.

Does the idea of financing government services through "fees on ecosystem usage" seem more fair than income or sales tax?

TerraPass

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:52:11 GMT

Screw feeling guilty about my CO2 emissions for that flight back east, offset purchased.

TerraPass sells carbon offsets. WorldChanging.org rather likes how transparent TerraPass is with how they allocate the purchased offsets.

I've seen the TerraPass driving offset decal on a larger SUV near work.

Also they crunched some numbers to determine the cities with the highest CO2 offsets purchased per capita. Pasadena came in #7.

Louisville

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:52:43 GMT

I went with my girlfriend to her grandmothers memorial service in Louisville, KN this weekend.

I rather dislike flying these days from the combination of the stupid things the TSA makes you do, plus the guilt for the massive CO2 emissions from flying. Our tickets were originally for thursday, but thanks to the great American Airlines landing gear inspection fiasco our we got moved to friday.

The good side to being delayed was discovering that my cat had managed to cut her eye somehow, which almost made me give up on going, but dragonblink managed to contact The best little cat house and we boarded my cat in a "better place".

The family was grateful I came, and it's pretty clear that they all know that we're a couple, though I find it interesting though we're introduced as "A and her friend B" most people seemed to guess that we were 'uhm, friends'.

The memorial went well. The part I found really odd, though was that though we were in an Episcopalian Church, several people did native american styled songs.

Everything is basically wrapped up and we're waiting to go home.

And then I can rescue my kitty.

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:26:43 GMT

Yes, really, 350 ppm

According to Jim Hansen, a noted climate scientist, we need to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at no more than 350 parts per million. His data also says we cannot pass at most 450 ppm, without irreversible damage to our climate. We are currently at 385 ppm. Below are the measurements from Mauna Loa.

The implication is that the line representing current carbon dioxide concentration needs start going down right now.

Need to lose

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:51:34 GMT

I need to lose weight, and a really effective tool for weight loss is a good program of self-monitoring.

If you live in the US, they'll tell you you should weigh yourself "regularly" and keep a food log.

The problem is that manually keeping track of that is a pain, and so people rapidly stop doing it, even if they've got a doctor standing over them telling them to do it.

I think the solution to this is better automated tools to make this process of self-monitoring beyond trivial.

This lead me to discover the Tanita BC-500 a body fat/scale that logs its measurements to a usb stick. (Of course it's one of those only-in-japan products I keep wanting).

Not to mention people still looking at me strangely when I mutter about bar or rfid coded food packaging and storage containers, so you can have an accurate accounting of how many calories you've eaten in a day without actually having to do anything.

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:45:58 GMT

As a follow-up to my previous aircraft security post, I really hope who ever gets elected stops playing the "be frightened of the boogy-terrorists" card and reels the TSA in some.

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:52:13 GMT

View Poll: #1156414

Rough analysis...

life_expectancy = 75 # roughly
average_passenger_age = 30 # guessed
average_passengers_per_flight = 200 # guessed
minutes_life_lost_to_death = (life_expectancy-average_passenger_age) * 365 * 24 * 60

chance_per_year = 0.2
average_passangers_served_per_year = 50000 * 365

(chance_per_year * average_passengers_per_flight * minutes_life_lost) / (average_passangers_served_per_year) = minimum_shortened_security_screening

Python on OS X 10.5 Leopard

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:33:38 GMT

I was trying to run the subversion plugin for bazaar, and ran into a confusing problem with python on OS X 10.5.

It turns out that there's already a copy of the python svn interface in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Extras/lib/python and when I added a python .pth file to my upgraded subversion install in the "offical" local install location of /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages' it didn't work.

The relevant parts of the default 10.5 python sys.path look like:

'/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/readline-2.5.1-py2.5-macosx-10.5-i386.egg',
'/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Extras/lib/python',
'/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/lib-tk',
'/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload',
'/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages',
'/usr/local/svn-1.5.0-dev/lib/svn-python',

So the vendor version in Extras was first, no wonder it didn't work.

However, packages I installed via leopard's easy_install were way up at the head of sys.path, that seems interesting.

$ cat /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/easy-install.pth

import sys; sys.__plen = len(sys.path)
./readline-2.5.1-py2.5-macosx-10.5-i386.egg
import sys; new=sys.path[sys.__plen:]; del sys.path[sys.__plen:]; p=getattr(sys,'__egginsert',0); sys.path[p:p]=new; sys.__egginsert = p+len(new)

Those import lines look promising, and placing them into my custom .pth bumped my version of the svn library up above the version lurking in Extras.

being healthy is hard

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:56:21 GMT

I went to my doctor today, and my blood work says I'm healthy, the scale says I'm pretty noticeably overweight.

So I asked my doctor, refer me to a nutritionist, since I haven't been able to do anything about my weight on my own.

The office staff then told me, "no we can't give you a referral since you don't have diabetes"

Great. I actually have to get sick before you can help me to avoid getting sick.

And it's so easy to wade through the crap about "weight loss" to find something reasonable.

Don't they know that we need specific suggestions to improve, not a general "control your eating? get more exercise?" I want help finding spots of time, and I really want someone to deliver food that isn't actively trying to kill me to my door.

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:16:44 GMT

I was thinking about something recently...

Why do I dislike TV?

Am I just bowing to the anti-capitalist peer presssure? Or is there something deeper at work?

I do know that I have trouble looking at other things when a TV is on, I do know that at times when my girlfriend is watching TV I leave the room so I can concentrate. Though I think I'm getting better at ignoring the TV.

There are TV shows that I think are neat like Mythbusters, and yet I know that if my girlfriend wasn't around, even with DVRing them, I still wouldn't watch.

I do waste vast amounts of time playing MMOs, and I do spend time searching the internet looking for things that are currently interesting to me. Heck I even work and hack on interesting personal projects. My parents watched TV though I didn't use TV as a "babysitter" (as far as I can remember). TV watching is no worse to my protestant guilt about not working 24/7 than MMOs are, so I the looking down on TV for being "immoral" doesn't seem to make sense.

I do know I desperately hate intrusive advertising, so I do know that I loathe TV that hasn't been flagged with commercial skip.

The media I do interact with seems to be non-linear, commercials are relatively static and easy to skip (or best yet don't exist), it is interactive and I can easily pause, skip, rewind, or switch to another thread.

(E.G reading a blog post, might lead to a quick search about some concept that I didn't understand.)

Another difference, on a recent mythbusters, I noticed how often they repeated themselves. The experimental setup was completely re-described every time they switched back to it, after every commercial break, and after every A/B story switch.

It would be a lot nicer if they just got to the point, and didn't waste time repeating themselves. Mostly I think my reading speed is vastly higher than most peoples speaking speed, so its more efficient for me to read than to have to listen to someone talk.

Dealing with people is stressful

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:53:30 GMT

Its sad how having too many meetings at work (And TAC), makes me exceed my threshold for dealing with people, leaving me with a deep desire to curl up in the corner and seriously focus on avoid dealing with everyone.

Why 12 hour clocks?

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:05:51 GMT

Being an anti-social creature of the unix server farm, I have a preference for 24 hour time. It always seemed more "logical" and less ambiguous to me. I could imagine needing to meet someone anytime between 8 and 12, and being very confused about when that really is.

But of course since 12 hour is the convention in the US, everyone thinks I'm weird for setting all my clocks to 24 hour time.

But, imagine my surprise when I went researching 24 hour watches I learned the following from 24 Hour Analog Dial and 24 Hour Watch

1. "Sundials use some or all of the 24 hour dial..."
2. You can use an analog 24 hour watch to find north by pointing the hour hand toward the sun, the 0 mark now points toward north.

So why 12 hour time?

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:57:00 GMT

Google news reported that the center for public integrity released a database of false statements by the bush administration about Iraq. I didn't see the link to the actual web site in the CNN article, so here it is.

War Card

I'm going to go crawl back into fantasy land and ignore the vast suck that is the real world.

OpenSim

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:53:26 GMT

I set up OpenSim and managed to connect the SecondLife client to it.

There's something kinda of cool about being able to command the very ground to rise up into a mountain, or descend into a lake.

I'm also making progress at trying to compile my own copy of the second life client, maybe I can finally understand why the walk animation is so wretched.

Mornings

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:13:38 GMT

Our lab is closely collaborating with Stanford for the ENCODE project which leads to an unpleasant for me, 9am weekly status conference call. (I also find being forced to get up, frequently destroys my ability to produce any code).

Aside from having to get up early in the morning, and the futility of meetings, there's also the wretched sound quality from a bunch of people huddling around a speaker phone. With traditional telephony, remote call-ins are too expensive for me to call in while I'm still home.

So I suggested using ventrilo as an alternative and my boss was intrigued by the idea.
Especially since it would work better for all the primary investigators who are wandering around the world.