Seville's Solar Tower

I heard about this in an NPR story and followed up by watching a video from the BBC. This thing is incredibly cool! I'd love to see it in person. This "solar tower" uses 600 mirrors to focus the sun's rays on a single point at the top of the tower where water is heated for turning turbines. I had heard of a different "solar tower" design that used panels and convection for moving air-driven turbines, but this one was new to me.

(Rhetorical question) Why isn't the US involved in more research like this? Each of these designs comes from other countries.

City Museum

While recently in St. Louis on vacation, I had one of the coolest experiences. The City Museum! This place is part art, part playground and all fun. Seems like a large group of artists were set loose on this old abandoned shoe factory and went wild creating art from "found objects" (e.g. "junk") from in and around the city. The results are amazing. The highlight was MonstroCity, which is the outdoor playground consisting of old airplanes, a castle turret, and bunch of scaffolding that you climb through, with many tight squeezes and vertigo-inducing heights. You can see our pics at Flickr (and see all "citymuseum" tagged photos) and there are loads of cool pics on their website. Better yet, go and experience it for yourself!

You can read about the City Musuem at there website. There is also a very interesting feature in Wired magazine.

Photo in Post-Dispatch

We recently made a family trip to St. Louis (my hometown) and visited the Gateway Arch. While taking pictures outside, a photographer approached me and took this shot that ended up on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We went two days after a recent outage that they experienced with their tram system (that takes you to the top). Everything is still running fine, but they had to shut down one side of the Arch tram system and it made big news. The photo at the left is the resulting picture you see me taking in the newspaper photo.

Wolf migration to Colorado

This is old news, but it was news to me. The Colorado Division of Wildlife believes they have evidence of wolf migration into Colorado. They even posted a video. It appears a male wolf may have crossed the border with Wyoming to possibly establish territory or to look for a mate. Of course, this doesn't really constitute a migration as he might of just crossed back over into Wyoming. But as the gray wolf population grows (estimates have 3,800 in the lower 48) and with the incredible range of these animals, such migrations could continue. Thankfully, any wolf in Colorado is currently protected under USFWS regulations as it is still listed as an endangered species. But western states (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Colorado) are drafting their own management plans to handle wolves as they will become responsible if wolves are taken off the endangered species list. Currently, the de-listing of the wolf is expected to become a protracted legal battle.

I mentioned the incredible range of these animals. They can defend territory ranging from 50 to 1,000 square miles. For fun, I calculated the rough distance a wolf might have migrated if this sighting (north of Walden, CO) was a Yellowstone wolf (see Yahoo map - about 500 miles). The Colorado DOW found no tag or collar that would indicate it was a Yellowstone wolf and it is possible that it migrated from another state (Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona all were part of a reintroduction program as well as Wyoming/Yellowstone). Still, it is sort of fun to imagine these animals traveling these distances.

You can read more about the gray wolf here:

• Gray Wolf - Colorado Division of Wildlife
• NRDC: Wildlife on the Brink - Gray Wolf (Rockies/Prairie)

Cycling and doping

Lance Armstong spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival about doping in cycling. He said something that I have told people for a long time. The reason that cycling has so many doping convictions is because they test the most. Consider for a moment what things would look like if the NFL or MLB actually took doping seriously.

"If you went to Major League Baseball and said, 'We're going to have random, unannounced, out-of-competition controls,' they would tell you, 'You're crazy. No way, we're not playing another game.' The NFL, they would never do that. NHL, no way. Golf, forget it. Tennis, forget it. Of course, cyclists get tested more than anything else, and perhaps that's why they get caught more than anyone else."

Dragon's Lair

If you were an arcade rat like me circa 1983, you probably remember Dragon's Lair. It was the most exciting game in the arcade when it hit and large crowds would gather around the console to watch. Animated by veteran Disney artists, it was enjoyable simply to watch. Besides it was cheaper! :) It was also one of the first games to cost more than the standard $0.25 (I believe you played it for $0.50).

Well, now you can re-live the experience in full 1080p HD on your PS3 or Blu-ray player (from Digital Leisure).

Rome Reborn

Most often when you think of 3D animation, you think games and movies...entertainment in general. This is a very cool example of using 3D animation for real-life purposes. Researchers at the University of Virginia have used 3D models and animation to reproduce ancient Rome with elaborate detail (article in Newsweek). Visit http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/ and choose Gallery->Video Clips to see very cool fly through videos.

Federal money for bike commuting

I caught the tail end of this NPR story this morning. Marin County was awarded $20m to promote bike commuting. Adoption will still lag because unfortunately most of our modern cities and communities are just not laid out in favor of bikers or pedestrians. They were built based on auto transportation. The distances between pointA and pointB become too long for people to seriously consider anything but driving. Also, the car has made us expect quicker arrival times. It takes longer if we walk or bike. Nevermind that obesity is an epidemic in this country. What's more important? Getting there faster or dying of diabetes?

Fear of willfulness...

While the brew-haha over Microsoft's latest patent lawsuit is decidedly not a news story (also see Slashdot), I did learn more about the absurd nature of software patent law.

In fact, searching for potential patent problems can actually leave a company financially exposed: if a lawsuit concludes a patent was infringed, a company or individual that knew about the potential infringement must pay triple the financial damages compared with an unknowing infringement.

"The fear of willfulness is so great that often firms instruct their engineers not to look at patents," (from CNET)

How stupid is that? The image I have in my mind when I read these stories about software patent litigation is that of pin-stripe suited lawyers in imaginary WWI trenches lobbing big paper stacks across to the others trenches. "Take that! That's my patent!" "Boom! Here comes my patent right back at you!" :)



Obviously a very broken system in need of repair. But in the meantime it keeps many a patent attorney and IT tabloid reporter employed. :)

The semantic web is here...again

The O'Reilly Radar is at work again. Tim is focusing his attention on what I found to be the most compelling point in his web 2.0 manifesto...data.

There is a lot excitement on the web these days relative to the old topic of the semantic web. The term used is metatagging. It has been popularized by websites such as del.icio.us and flickr where you can ascribe your own meta data to information (bookmarks or images) that you are posting to an online database. Now the idea is being taken further by some folks at a company called MetaWeb (lead by AI guru Danny Hillis). Their project Freebase is a free database of information, a lot like the Wikipedia, where users can assign their own metadata to entries and also dynamically help create the ontology. Other companies have similar projects in the works, like Google Base, and Open Directory project.

Technology rarely wins

Someone had forwarded me this. I found it to be an interesting discussion on the state of "web 2.0". In particular, how quickly the marketing machine kicks in to capitalize on the promise of new technology (e.g. read discussion on Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, the anointed "Godfather of Web 2.0")

"...technology rarely wins. I'm a technological optimist who believes that great technology always wins, and if the planet is to continue spinning properly, great technology must win, less there is no justice. And, naturally, I'm constantly disappointed. Technology rarely does win, and when it does its normally the result of a lot of marketing that shouldn't be required. Because at the end of the day, in the real world, people don't care about technology but rather what it enables them to do."

Perhaps in the end the biggest impact of web 2.0 (ignoring all the hype) is that it actually enables people to do things they care about.

Flex is the future

Bruce Eckel writes that Java has lost it's edge. In particular, he sites the very old problem that Java applets never capitalized on the promise of rich internet applications (RIAs). Instead of embracing AJAX (in fact he rejects it based on his disdain for Javascript), he is recommending Flash/Flex. It appears he is now working for Adobe (literally, he says "Full disclosure: I’m in the process of working out a consulting contract with Adobe, to help them teach people about Flex. But long before this, I became convinced that Flash, and Flex in particular, was the best solution for the user-interface problem, and I began writing this article long before Adobe expressed interest in my assistance.") I also find it funny that he rejects Javascript, but is embracing ActionScript (on which Flash is based) when they are both derived from EMCAScript.

Should we trade carbon emissions for nuclear waste?

This commentary suggests that nuclear power is the answer to the IPCC's report on global warming. That the U.S. should lead by investing in nuclear power plant construction as a bridge from our carbon-based energy economy to future uses of renewable-based energy. Should we simply trade our carbon emissions with dangerous nuclear waste? Have we really learned any lesson if we continue to pollute our environment? Only this time instead of greenhouse gases we will be producing waste that lasts thousands of years without any form of safe disposal. Yucca Mountain is not the answer for disposal. It's suggested the issue of disposal can simply be overcome by showing a political will to resolve "not in my back yard" complaints. Is Mr. McNeil suggesting that he'd be happy to host a nuclear waste disposal site in his backyard? Until physics research brings about a truly safe method of disposal, we as humans are being irresponsible to our future generations by generating this nuclear waste.

The economics of the argument are not convincing either. It is suggested that nuclear technology is available in the short-term, while renewable energy would take more long-term investment. When costs for a new plant run from $3 to $4 billion and time for construction is 7-12 years, this seems like neither a cost effective, nor a timely solution. Wouldn't this money and effort be better spent on truly renewable energy research? Or perhaps investment needs to be made in nuclear physics research that can lead to safe disposal methods?

Procrastination

Interesting piece on a new study on a subject almost everyone is familiar with...procrastination. Interesting take-away for me were that technology, instead of being the savior of productivity, is apparently the culprit causing chronic procrastination. Most procrastination is caused by temptation. Temptations that are more pervasive and accessible because of technology (tv, videos online, the internet, cell phone, iPods, etc.)

The other take-away was that people incur more credit card debt when doing last-minute Christmas shopping, due to procrastination. Sort of an obvious observation, but worth noting the added economic impact of procrastinating.

Best quote:

"That stupid game Minesweeper— that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society."

Your laptop has free will...

...by one definition anyway. Interesting NYT article explores the concept of free will.

If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”

Something to think about next time you boot up.