Firefox 3.5:

Available now. And what's new?

Pirate Latitudes:

With all the deaths in recent days (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billie Mays), I was reminded of another death that really caught me off guard. Perhaps my favorite author (he occupies the largest portion of my library per book), Michael Crichton's passing was sudden, unexpected, and... well, it left me with an empty feeling. I thought I'd have another decade or two of reading new material from him, and the loss of that still gets me. Fortunately, not long after his passing, it was reported that two novels would find their way to posthumous publication. Details on the second are scarce, but the first, titled Pirate Latitudes, will be published on November 24. It is now available for pre-order from Amazon.

Book Synopsis

Build A Simple Dynamo:

More Thoughts on Windows 7:

We've had a couple more days to mess around with the new Windows 7 release candidate, and have a few more thoughts:

• I've already griped about no flash support with the install (see the previous post), so let me extend that to gripe about no out-of-the-box utility for reading .pdf files. Again, it's certainly no big deal to install something like Adobe Reader, and it takes all of thirty seconds or so, but I don't care. If you own a computer and have no use for a .pdf reader, then your rig is obviously used for nothing but porn, which, as far as I can tell, is probably the only genre of computer use that doesn't ever use .pdfs. For the rest of us, we need something to read these files.
• I've had pains getting my data back from my old linux backup, and I mentioned that I've installed a virtual machine running Linux Mint (my old distro) in order to access the information on my external drive. Using VirtualBox Guests and this post, I've mounted both my external drive and a shared folder to be able to drag and drop files inside the virtual machine onto my Windows desktop. This, I think, is the definition of a Rube Goldberg fix for a dumb-ass thing that I did. Think ahead of time, and you can avoid issues like these.
• Matlab was a problem for me. I had some kind of Java issue related to problems others have had, but I still had to make my own fix from a patchwork of other people's solutions (as is always the case). Because of the Java issue, the installer failed at the registry step with an "unknown exception," so I had to manually retrieve my license file from the Mathworks website. After editing the license file in Matlab's installation directory, the Java issue caused the launcher to crash with a page's worth of errors. The solution for this turned out to be editing the properties of the laucher and changing a "compatibility mode" setting to "Windows Vista." After this, everything seems to be working fine. No fault to Windows on this one.
• Internet Explorer turns out to lag WAY too much for me to use it willingly. I'm not sure why it does that, but it does. New tabs lag by MANY seconds, but this seems to be a general phenomenon when opening anything with the browser. I took the opportunity to try out Google Chrome, but didn't like that either after a days use or so. So, back to Firefox where I can make my settings just as I want them. Namely, deleting history, cookies, and junk when I close the browser, no password storing, no autocomplete, etc. Chrome and Firefox use the same engine, essentially, and are both MUCH faster than IE. Of course, in saying that, I'm implying that those two things are related, but I don't actually know that that is the issue with IE.
• Definitely a plus for Windows over linux is the graphical support for BOINC, through which I like to run Rosetta@home (and have for a couple of years now). I also have had the chance to try out Google Earth again now that it doesn't require me to fiddle with graphical issues between my hardware, openGL, Compiz, and the program itself (damn you ATI drivers!). There are workarounds for these issues, but I'm tired of that shit. No problems now, though. And what's absolutely remarkable is looking at Mars in Google Earth. You navigate the planet in much the same way, but the AMAZING thing is that instead of this "street view" phenomenon you have on Earth, you can zoom down to look through panoramic photos taken by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Wow. I had goosebumps.

I think that'll do it for now, but expect more soon. Stay tooned.

Thoughts on Windows 7:

After having had a half-day or so of testing the Windows 7 operating system (available for pre-order today, by the way), I'm still fairly impressed. My observations so far:

• No flash support out of the box. It's certainly no big deal to go get a flash player and install it, but I don't understand what it is with operating systems not offering full media/internet support from step one. With linux, it was always the issue of free/open software, which is bloody stupid and always has been. If you want to live in a free/open license world, you might as well go live in a cave instead of trying to toe an imaginary non-proprietary line out in Platonic heaven. Me? I use open source when it works because it's often better and less hassle. But you know what? When it doesn't work or isn't available, I'll take my flash plugin. This one might not be the fault of Windows 7 because this isn't an official release. I don't know.


• Warning! When moving from linux to Windows, I backed up my shit on an external drive formatted to ext3. Windows DOES NOT LIKE THIS. In fact, I can't even access my drive at this point. And, to reiterate, ALL MY SHIT IS ON IT. If you're gonna do this, use fat32 and you won't have problems. This is obviously my own dumb-ass fault.


• How I'm solving the previous problem, however, is thorugh the wonders of Sun Microsystems. I'm going to set up a virtual machine with linux running through my Windows operating system. How, you ask? Virtualbox. When Alan Turing came up with the notion of a universal machine, he wasn't talking about this. But he should've been.


• When I install an OS, there are a small handful of programs I need. One of them is Matlab. I've had problems with installing it on my 64 bit machine before, because it isn't supported. I seem to have big problems installing it in Windows 7, due to an installer exception that I haven't investigated yet. So, FAIL on this one. I actually don't know whether to blame Matlab or Windows on this one, but I'm leaning towards Matlab just because I've had so many damned problems with it in the past.


• I haven't used Internet Explorer in YEARS. It comes (obviously) with Windows 7, so I've been trying it out. Not much to say on this one, except that there seems to be a serious lag when you open up a new tab. Not sure why. Somewhat interestingly, there is an option in IE that lets you surf "privately," where I guess the browser collects no information about your activities, etc. Is that nice to have? Maybe. I tried it out, but it doesn't really do much of anything for me. I'm more of a Firefox guy, and I always set it to pretty much do this as soon as I install it. No remembering passwords, no cookie hoarding, clear all my data upon closing, etc. That's how it should be, because that's what bookmarks are for, and a remembered password isn't really a password, now is it?


• A definite plus of a non-official version of Windows seems to be how slim it is. There's none of the stupid shit (read: useless programs) you normally get when you install Windows. That saves the day after that's usually spent cleaning it out. Definite plus, here. Will it be that way on the official release in October? Almost certainly not, but who knows?

Stay tooned.

Windows 7:

The 'Dump has decided to cast off the poor hardware support of Linux and re-enter the perilous world of Windows operating systems. As you may know, the next release from Microsoft is Windows 7, and you can at this very moment take it out for a test. The OS is no longer in the beta stage, and the current download (build 7100) is their newest release candidate. While Windows 7 will be on sale this Fall, your evaluation copy will last you into next year before it craps out, so take advantage. I wouldn't be suprised if we posted more on this topic in the coming weeks after we've had a little more time to test the waters. After about an hour or so, however, I'd say come on in...

Stay tooned.

Catherine Mohr: Future Surgery

Awesome.

Tour the International Space Station:

Wow. Thanks to astronaut Michael Barratt for the tour.

Water on Enceladus:

The internet is abuzz with the news published today in Nature: new evidence points to water on Enceladus. That, of course, points to the possiblity of life there. Good breakdown here via Wired.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

Here's the launch video from the launch on June 18. The craft is currently in orbit around the moon and a live video feed should be available shortly, so be sure to check that out.

Alastair Reynolds:

io9 reports that science fiction author (and my personal favorite) Alastair Reynolds just inked a $1.65 million dollar contract with his publisher for ten books over the next ten years. Wow. That's a lot of work, but good news for we readers of sci-fi. Read more about it here.

Extremophiles:

Click here to view an impressive and very interesting list (with images) from Wired.

Wait, what's an extremophile, anyway?

An Ancient Lake of Mars:

"Unambiguous evidence" of shorelines on Mars has been found by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, indicating the presence of an ancient lake sometime in Mars' past. Read the story here and here.

Do Not Want:

Do I even have to say anything?

Well, I do want to say one thing: if that chick is so damned disgusted by the thought of wiping her own ass, maybe there's something wrong with her ass.

Want To Play:

No, THIS is cool: Blue Angels

Go Navy!

This is Cool: Stormchasing

Transcendent Man:

I don't think it's a secret that I'm not a Kurzweil fan. I once tried to pick my way through The Singularity is Near, but failed. Nevertheless, I'll definitely see the movie because I think it's interesting (did the same thing with What the Bleep, I'm not ashamed to say) even if I don't buy into many of Kurzweil's predictions. What I don't like, however, is to be a doubting Thomas for no reason. So here's my beef:

Number One:

The singularity isn't something I'm interested in discussing in detail, because it's essentially just the postulate from which all of Kurzweil's predictions come from. I don't necessarily object to the construct or the idea itself, I just don't believe that the preponderance of evidence supports this happening in the foreseeable future.

Number Two:

The law of accelerating returns is more like the law of diminishing returns. The favorite example of this is Moore's Law, which, I'm sorry to say, is visibly broken in its traditional form. We are butting up against the limits of the size of transistors we can make per unit area with current techniques (slightly over 30nm is the current cream of Silicon Valley), although graphene has been talked about quite a bit. Interestingly, the thing about graphene-scale transistors is that you're essentially getting down to scales where the same problems you have with quantum computers come into play, i.e. you're dealing with probabilities and quantum effects.

Some people think that processing cores will be the new Moore's law (i.e. that we'll have two cores in our computers, then four, then eight, etc). However, software to run on 8+ cores of hardware is prohibitively difficult from a programming perspective outside of rigid computational niches. I do actually agree with Kurzweil that things like optical and quantum computers may be the next big thing, but the idea that we'll have these supersmart computers to figure everything out for us isn't the whole story. If you've ever had experience with neural networks, you'll know that they are really just a set of heuristics for constructing systems of equations and programs to solve computationally difficult problems. They work for us because we have all this computer power available, and thus we can go a little further than we could've otherwise. But these methods are computationally dirty and WASTEFUL, and much like brute force cryptography is easily defeated by simple permutations (even with modern computers), so goes the notion of having computers do all our thinking.

Let me give you an example: a standard 128-bit key would take a computer checking 1 billion keys per second (let's pretend like that's what you could get out of a 1 GHz processor, just for the sake of argument) 1x10^22 years to try all the permutations. Ah, you say, my computer's MUCH faster than that. If you had a 10 GHz processor (which you don't, and again I'm simplifying the calculations here) you'd still be at 10^21 years. The age of the universe is only on the order of 10^10 years. The fastest supercomputer in the world (IBM Roadrunner) would be ~10^16 years in cracking the key (assuming 3 flops/Hz (AMD) in equivalency to previous calculation; again, there's some fuzzy math going on and oversimplification, but we're just playing with numbers here). Maybe this is all just a bad analogy, anyway, but as for having computers take over all our thinking, it seems like the permutations are just going to catch up with you somewhere along the line.

Number Three:
If the functionality of the brain becomes an open book in the next 20-30 years, it will be a happy accident. Believe me, I study the brain and I can tell you that nobody knows what's going on in any meaningful way. I, for one, think that if you want to create superintelligence, you should probably start by doing a better job of making people intelligent and focus on education instead of trying to create intelligent robots. Call me crazy. In fact, here's a prediction for you a la Kurzweil: as the gap between front-line science and what's taught in public schools grows wider and wider, pseudoscience will come to largely replace mysticism and other fringe beliefs as they struggle to maintain a place in the minds of people living in a modern technological world. Even the most intelligent are not immune to pseudoscience.

Number Four:
As to "living forever," I object strongly to rich people spending exorbitant sums of money on living forever when the child mortality rates are 18% in Angola, 15% in Sierra Leone, 15% in Afghanistan, 14% in Liberia, and almost 12% in Niger, to name but a few (these numbers come from The World Factbook). My philosophy is to make sure everybody gets a full share of a normal human lifespan before we go trying to live forever.

Anyway, it's always easy to be a naysayer but I'm willing to go conservatively along with Kurzweil far enough to say that something cool will probably happen within the next fifty years. What it'll be, I don't know. Go see Transcendent Man and maybe you'll get a glimpse, or maybe not. There'll be some cool shit to see in there anyhow.

Swine Flu Declared Pandemic by WHO:

Based on the presence of documented swine flu infections in 72 countries, the World Health Organization has declared the first flu pandemic since 1968. Read the story here.

It's worth noting that this new classification does NOT mean the virus is more virulent than before, that it has mutated, that it is more dangerous than before, etc.

iPhone 3GS:

Releases on June 19 (more info here).

Haynes Apollo 11 Manual:

OMFG. I will simply have to buy a copy of this: Haynes (the company that produces the popular automotive manuals you've probably seen/used) has just come out with a NASA Apollo 11 Manual. It's not expensive, and it's awesome.

Now, once you have this manual (which will give you the breakdown on all the hardware from the LM to the Saturn V, you need to go back through the archives to where we brought you the complete plans to build your own Apollo guidance computer. With these two things, you can... well... say sod off to SpaceShip One.

In case you missed the links:

Haynes Manual for Apollo 11

Apollo Guidance Computer

Thanks to Geekologie for pointing out the Haynes manual.

Do You Have the Right Stuff?

One of my favorite websites, NASA Watch, tells me that NASA has patented and sold the rights to manufacture and sell an electrolyte drink developed in-house for use by astronauts. What's an electrolyte drink, you ask? It's like a Gatorade, Powerade, Pedialyte, etc. intended to not only provide fluids for rehydration but also provide an optimum balance of dissolved ions like sodium and potassium lost typically through prolonged exertion, sweating, and things like that. Hence the intended use for astronauts, athletes, and anybody else who sweats like a whore in church.

Will I drink the shit out of the Right Stuff (that's the name, by the way)? You bet your ass. If only Ham, my personal hero, had some of this stuff back in '61, I bet... well, I don't know what I bet. But he should've had some. Will the novelty of a NASA-powered gatorade wear off faster than freeze-dried ice cream? I don't know that either, but I'm going to find out.

Read the press release here.

Final Fantasy VII:

For ten bucks on the PlayStation Network, I'm all over that. I still look back fondly on the 80 hours or whatever that I spent playing FFVII all those years ago... aahhh.

An Engineer's Guide to Cat Yodeling:

No reason.

Medeco Gets Picked:

Thanks to Wired.