This is the revised version:

"Someone once said that there was no doubt that we would colonize the Moon and Mars. The only question was what language would be spoken: the language of science or the language of business. My money is on business. The language of business is universal, ignores national borders, and is capable of speaking all human languages."

You can go to RocketForge to see the original quote, and his reasoning behind thinking that the original is not necessarily true.

Posted by: Ted at 07:42 PM | category: Space Program
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So here, take your pick:

• Reason #4,367 Why I Love Mu.Nu


• Defining a need is 75% of solving the problem


• Zombies overrun convent after nuns run out of ammo

Michele defined the need, which was the ability to post comments to blogs when reading via a PDA. See, she reads at lunch, away from her desk, and wanted a way to provide feedback without annoying her bosses by doing it on company time.

She emailed me, and I sent an email to one much wiser than I in this kind of technical matter. She also contacted Eric, who has come up with a solution! Rob at Light&Dark also chipped in to help avoid a potential pitfall for some of us.

Michele is also going to do a kind of "RSS Feeds for Dummies" post this weekend. I'm looking forward to that.

So there you go, Mu.Nu collectively putting it's heads together to resupply those poor nuns with enough hollow-points to tire out their holy little trigger fingers.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Posted by: Ted at 07:01 AM | category: SciTech
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But I know quite a few people who can't wait for this keyboard designed for gamers.

Posted by: Ted at 11:38 AM | category: SciTech
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(this rant brought to you by my findings while doing some online research)

Microsoft is big and rich and evil and gets no credit for their good charitable works, because they're not doing *enough*. Besides, they're big and rich and evil.

Apple is hip and cool and stands for the common man, because they're not Microsoft.

The iPod Shuffle has a built-in battery designed to deactivate after 144 charges. The battery is charged through the USB connector, which is also how you load songs onto the Shuffle. So if you change the songs on your Shuffle, regardless of the battery status, it counts as a recharge. And you only get 144 of them.

Apple charges sixty bucks to replace the Shuffle battery, which is 35%-65% of the entire unit price, depending on the model. If Microsoft tried crap like folks would be up in arms about what a ripoff it was and how they were taking advantage of their monopoly to jack up the little people for bigger profits. You know, like Republicans do.

Yet people bend over and let Apple stick it to 'em without complaint because you *know* that Apple is cool and hip and stands up for the regular guy. Like Democrats do.

You ignore the fact that *both* sides are screwing you over.

Lemmings.

Update: Pixy did some investigating and it looks like the 144 charge claim is an unsubstantiated myth lie. So we're back to the status quo, i.e. Microsoft is still evil, Apple is still hip and cool (even though they've sucked up bigtime to U2. Ick.)

Posted by: Ted at 05:23 AM | category: SciTech
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1 Microsoft is big and rich and evil.

Apple is also big and rich and evil, but with better uniforms.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 12, 2005 03:15 AM (RbYVY)

2 But that 144 charges sounds like an urban myth to me. Let me take a look.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 12, 2005 03:17 AM (RbYVY)

3 I took a look. The only place I found that claim was on Amazon, and it seems to have been deleted from there (it still shows up in Google). It shows up on a lot of other sites that link to Amazon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 13, 2005 04:07 AM (ymzzr)

4 And that's where I saw it. Nobody there called "Bull", so since it fit my preconceived notions... well, you know.

Posted by: Ted at August 13, 2005 09:21 AM (+OVgL)

5 Yeah, I'm well over 500 charges (I've had my iPod for almost two years, and charge it daily) and I've had zero battery problems. Most of the people that I've talked to about their iPods that have problems either use it heavily (12+ hours a day) or expose it to harsh conditions (extreme cold or heat.)

Posted by: Phelps at August 17, 2005 07:25 PM (8UMp8)

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I was commenting on a post below and suggested a google of "RATO packs". Being the curious george sort, I went ahead and took my own advice and lo and behold, lookie what I found:

(caption from 3rd photo down on the page)

Prowler just lifting off from STO launch using RATO pack with AeroTech™ M2500 motor and Aero Pack RA98 retainer.

The M2500 of which they speak is a popular Level 3 certification motor. That's right, we hobbty rocketeers get to play with military-grade propellants, or maybe it's the military that gets to play with consumer-grade rocketry motors.

Posted by: Ted at 09:17 AM | category: SciTech
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At least that's what some folks want you to believe when it comes to climate change. Some scientists have even suggested that an increase in certain clouds over the Earths' poles could be indication that the process is speeding up.

Or maybe not.

Polar mesospheric clouds - also called noctilucent clouds - form in the summer over the poles at altitudes of about 52 miles (84 kilometers), making them the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. They have been monitored in recent years because they are thought to be sensitive to the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere.

That part is correct.

Researchers using satellite and ground-based instruments tracked the exhaust plume from Columbia's liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 16, 2003. The plume was roughly 650 miles long and two miles wide.

As with all shuttle launches, about 97 percent of this exhaust turns into water - a by-product of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel. The resulting 400 tons of extra water in the atmosphere has an observable effect on cloud formation.

Stevens and his colleagues observed a significant increase in polar mesospheric clouds over Antarctica in the days following the launch.

Oops, this sounds like one of those "ignore the man behind the curtain" moments. During discussions on the subject, I like to remind folks that Earth has *never* had a stable climate in its history. That always makes 'em stop, but it doesn't always make them think.

Posted by: Ted at 11:33 AM | category: SciTech
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Wikipedia is a cool concept where anyone can enter information about a subject, and thus a "people's reference" comes to life. Unfortunately (as the L.A. Times recently discovered), it also allows any nitwit with a cause to enter, delete, edit and overwrite information about any subject. This means that Joe Bigot can write an entry on the KKK and make it sound like a social club with a few naughty fringe elements who got carried away with the whole lynching thing. Likewise, Daisy Treehugger can pound out a screen on Halliburton and the price of Ozone and to the unaware, it carries the same credibility as actual fact.

I like Wikipedia a lot. I don't trust it at all, but I like it.

This morning I stumbled across this idea and ensuing project to create a tool to track the editing history of a Wikipedia entry:

I'd love to see a tool for animating Wikipedia history for a given entry or block of text (see Udell's screencast for an example). Bonus points for highlighting what changed in each version, and extra special bonus points for a way to scrub backwards and forwards through time.

Check out the link and be amazed as they've made some quick progress towards the goal. I'll have to dig a little deeper, but this sounds like just the thing to help decide if a Wikipedia subject has been hijacked for a cause or not.

Thanks to Dawn for the original link which led to the link where I saw another link to where I found this. Oh, and you get to see a video where Tom Cruise kills Oprah.

Posted by: Ted at 09:23 AM | category: Links
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Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America. It was founded in 1607 in what is now Virginia. One of the founders was Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, and there is evidence that a skeleton found outside the site of the Jamestown Fort is Gosnold's.

Archaeologists hoping to determine whether an unearthed skeleton belongs to one of the founders of the first permanent English settlement in North America began work Monday to excavate his sister's 360-year-old remains in eastern England.

A DNA match would be confirmation.

British and American researchers on Monday began work to remove a small part of Elizabeth Gosnold Tilney's skeleton from beneath the floor of All Saints Church in the English village of Shelley, 60 miles northeast of London. Scientists working with skeletal remains can only trace DNA through maternal relatives.

I didn't know that part about maternal relatives. Archeologists also believe they've located one of Gosnold's nieces and will attempt a DNA match from her remains as well.

Gosnold, though largely unrecognized historically, is considered a primary organizer and head of the expedition that led to Jamestown's founding. Capt. John Smith's role received most of the attention because Gosnold became ill and died at age 36 - three months after arriving in Virginia.

You can read the whole story here. I also did another post about Jamestown way back, there are good links there too if you're into history.

Posted by: Ted at 04:23 AM | category: SciTech
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I knew that Airbus had been chipping away at Boeing's longtime dominance in the world aircraft market, but I hadn't heard that Boeing has since rallied strongly and has put "Airbus on the ropes".

From Der Spiegel:

While Boeing is practically fighting off demand for its new 787, which consumes significantly less jet fuel than earlier models, Airbus's managers are seemingly ripping each other apart in internal power struggles and intrigues.

Boeing has already received firm orders and commitments for over 260 787 Dreamliners, which is made entirely of lightweight synthetic materials. It's also using the technology and experience gained to update their popular 737 aircraft. Meanwhile, Airbus concentrated solely on it's A380 superjet and a new military jet, all but ignoring its aging small-to-midsize line of passenger jets.

Despite lots of buzz about the superjumbo, Airbus faces heavy customer penalties (measured in the tens of millions of Euros) as they recently announced that first deliveries will be delayed by at least six months. In addition, Airbus was once considered the leader in the competition to supply the US military with new tanker aircraft, but congress has since passed legislation forbidding the award of contracts to companies subsidized by governments, on the theory that such subsidies allow the artificial lowering of bid prices. Airbus now has almost no chance with the contract that they believed they could win.

Airbus isn't nearing collapse or bankruptcy, they've just squandered the chance to continue to grow their share of the world airliner market.

Thanks to Transterrestrial Musings for the pointer. Read the comments there too, because they bring up some points and counter-arguments that I hadn't heard or considered before.

Posted by: Ted at 04:36 AM | category: SciTech
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Sometimes NASA flies balloons.

The westward flight from Esrange [Sweden - RJ] to Alaska will test NASA's new long-lasting balloon vehicle and carries a 5,940-pound telescope at an altitude of 25 miles for six to nine days.

These are huge balloons. For example, an NFL football field is 300 feet long.

The balloon is 396 feet high and 462 feet in diameter. It is made of advanced materials and uses a pumpkin-shaped design to achieve flights up to 100 days. It holds up to 1.3 million cubic yards of helium.

Some interesting stuff happening. Who knew Sweden had a space corporation?

Posted by: Ted at 04:42 AM | category: SciTech
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In 1815, Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, erupted in the largest and most powerful display ever witnessed by mankind. The eruption itself and associated tidal waves killed 88,000 people.

If we reduce all the ash from Tambora to dense rock equivalents and include all ash flow tuffs that formed at the same time, we come up with about 36 cubic miles of rock. Quite a bit compared with the destructive U.S. eruptions of Mount St. Helens in 1980 that produced about 1/4 cubic mile.

Wow. Except, that's not the scary part. Geologists have been studying a geologically active region that has in the past underwent events of unimaginable power, dwarfing even Tambora. That place is called Yellowstone.

The volume of volcanic rock produced by the first Yellowstone caldera eruption was about 600 cubic miles—about 17 times more than Tambora, and 2,400 times as much as Mount St. Helen's, an almost incomprehensible figure. One more statistic: Ash from Tambora drifted downwind more than 800 miles; Yellowstone ash is found in Ventura, California to the west and the Iowa to the east.

Yellowstone was created by three separate volcanic geologic events. The last may have removed the southern portions of the Washburn mountain range.

Read that last sentence again.

Here's a simple analogy:

Imagine a bottle of carbonated water lying in the sun. Pick it up, shake it vigorously, maybe tap the cap...boom, it blows off. Instantly the pressure in the bottle drops, the dissolved carbon dioxide exsolves into bubbles and an expanding mass of bubbles and water jets into the sky. In a few seconds, the event is over. Wipe off your face and check the bottle; some of the water remains, but most of the gas is gone. This simple scenario is a scaled-down analogy of what happened 600,000 years ago in Yellowstone when the volatile-rich upper part of the magma chamber vented and erupted the Lava Creek Tuff.

And a simplified reconstruction of the real thing:

Nearer the vents, fiery clouds of dense ash, fluidized by the expanding gas, boiled over crater rims and rushed across the countryside at speeds over one hundred miles per hour, vaporizing forests, animals, birds, and streams into varicolored puffs of steam. Gaping ring fractures extended downward into the magma chamber providing conduits for continuing foaming ash flows.

More and more vapor-driven ash poured from the ring fractures, creating a crescendo of fury. As the magma chamber emptied, large sections of the foundering magma chamber roof collapsed along the ring fractures, triggering a chain reaction that produced a caldera 45 miles long and 28 miles wide.

Yellowstone is three separate but overlapping caldera, and the area is still extremely active in the geological sense. So a reoccurance isn't necessarily imminent, but at some point, it will happen.

Victims of the Mt. St. Helen's eruption were found with their lungs, sinuses and mouths full of ash. We've already seen how relatively minor that eruption was. Here's what you'll experience if you happen to be too close to the action.

Hot ash flows are fascinating. Driven by expanding gas, they are really clouds of hot glass shards and pumice plus expanding gas whose turbulence keeps everything flowing like water.

Not that you'd experience it for more than a fraction of a second. Merciful, that.

So there you have it, the scariest thing I've ever read, and I meant that literally. The full text is here: Yellowstone Calderas, and I have Transterrestrial Musings to thank for the nightmares.

Posted by: Ted at 05:54 AM | category: SciTech
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Vespa returns! Tres cool!

Posted by: Ted at 05:57 AM | category: SciTech
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My wife's PC finally gave up the ghost. The message we're getting is "Operating System Not Found" at startup, so I'm guessing something on the motherboard is kaput.

Fortunately we have most of it backed up, and what isn't we can easily recreate.

This PC has a new hard drive in it, which I'd like to remove and put into my PC. It's configured as the C: drive, and what I need to know is if I need to reformat it when I install or can I just rename it (D ? It'd be great if I could get the rest of the data off of it.

Any help?

Posted by: Ted at 07:30 AM | category: SciTech
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I've never heard of this phenomenom before.

Columns of white vapor streamed from the Atlantic this winter. About 8km west of an island called Terceira in the Azores, a submarine eruption was under way. Hot lava squeezed up through cracks in the ocean floor at about 500 meters below the surface of the ocean. The lava solidified into lava balloons. These gas-rich lava balloons interacted with cold seawater as they rose. This process generated steam, which emerged from the Atlantic like smoke from dozens of chimneys. The steam rose about 10 meters high. As the lava balloons reached the surface, the gas that made them buoyant escaped through cracks, and the balloons filled with water and sank.

You can keep the Sunday papers, I love to leisurely surf through the museum sites on my weekend mornings.

Here's another weird volcano I posted about some time ago.

Posted by: Ted at 10:28 AM | category: SciTech
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Astronomers are used to seeing star clusters orbiting other galaxies. Up to now, they've always been dense little globes filled with millions of suns.

The Andromeda galaxy is one of the Milky WayÂ’s nearest galactic neighbors.

Astronomers recently found star clusters of a type never seen before orbiting Andromeda.

More familiar to scientists are globular clusters. These collections of stars are densely packed.

The newly discovered clusters are much larger and less dense than globular clusters.

These “extended clusters” are not found in the Milky Way. Why not is still unknown.

Mankind may never know it all, but we continue to learn.

Posted by: Ted at 10:13 AM | category: SciTech
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After the world blows itself up, it won't be enough to watch out for the mutants roaming the blasted landscape. Scientists have discovered a species of ant that builds group-sized traps that allow them to subdue insects many times larger than themselves.

Giant ants waiting in ambush. Sweet dreams.

Posted by: Ted at 06:05 AM | category: SciTech
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Wanna build your very own Windows web development server? Here's a tutorial on what you need and where to get it, and it looks like all the software is free.

Posted by: Ted at 03:56 PM | category: SciTech
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Let's see, we've had unisexual lizards and modesty-protecting swimsuits, it must be time to step into the wayback machine for some ancient sex.

Archaeologist finds 'oldest porn statue'.

Over 7,000 years old, depicting a man and woman practicing the world's oldest intramural sport. They even named the male half of the statue, which is described as an 8 centimeter lower half of a man.

"This is such an interesting discovery," said Dr Sträuble, "as these figurines are not stylistic, but realistic.

8 centimeters? That ain't realistic around here, bucko.

Posted by: Ted at 06:05 AM | category: SciTech
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1 Uh Huh!Suuuuuuuure,Ted!HEHEHE

Posted by: Russ at April 13, 2005 09:52 AM (ObxzR)

2 *8 centimeters? That ain't realistic around here, bucko.*

Clearly, you never met my ex Kip. Or Andy. Or ...

Posted by: dawn at April 14, 2005 09:12 PM (Dh1V0)

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The American Museum of Natural History website has an intriguing article up about the whiptail lizard, and how they avoid a problem that occurs among most species when cross-bred in nature.

Most products of crossbreeding, such as the mule, are sterile. But the New Mexico Whiptail, as well as several other all-female species of whiptail lizard, does reproduce, and all of its offspring are female. Moreover, it reproduces by parthenogenesis -- its eggs require no fertilization, and its offspring are exact and complete genetic duplicates of the mother.

The article is short but interesting, and makes me wonder anew at the workings of Mother Nature. Here, she's obviously used natural selection to solve a common problem, by eliminating the wet spot.

Posted by: Ted at 04:16 PM | category: SciTech
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Most everyone has heard of the SETI@home project, where you can download a screensaver that uses your PC's downtime to process data collected by the big radio telescopes pointed "out there" looking for life.

There is a similar effort to utilize PC's as a massively distributed platform to study protein folding.

What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease.

Check out details here, and Rich has more links and information at his place.

Posted by: Ted at 10:04 AM | category: SciTech
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