Vaclav Havel on global warming: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/opinion/27havel.html?ex=1348545600&en=ade3d5bdf14b602a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/opinion/27havel.html?ex=1348632000&en=538e92d3708098d5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Planning for the eventual withdrawal in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/17/070917fa_fact_packer?printable=true

A.V. Club idolizes the music of 1997; I remain skeptical: http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/it_was_40_10_years_ago_today_18/1

The relay computer is awesome: http://www.electronixandmore.com/project/relaycomputertwo/

"Order is illegal! It goes against the laws of thermodynamics!": http://dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1778

http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/08/small-steps.html:

Yours(1) Latino(2) Lover(3)

1) Not really "yours", more "community". I love "you" but "you" need to realize that I need to be seeing other people.
2) Not really "Latino". Unless of course my Spanish or Brazilian friends would like to name me an "honorary Latino" or "Latino by association". I'd be definitely down with that. The only food I can make that is eatable and doesn't force the fire department to evacuate the building before are nachos. I'm a definition of grace in the kitchen. "Whatever you have in the kitchen I will make it burn" is my motto. Plus I'm sporting quite an attitude to boot. "Make Zack a Latino" campaign. We can make it work!
3) Not really "lover". More "no feelings haver". Though technically I've worked on software for so long that hate is, next to sarcasm, my primary export.

Some ideas for microcontroller projects:

• Rocket launch coordination: it would be easier for THORHAMMER to reach target altitude using multiple rocket boosters, but they have to be ignited in a coordinated fashion. I would use a circuit that can sense whether each engine has fired, which would unlatch an electromechanical launch stop only when they are all lit. A human can't do this, since an engine only burns for a second or so, but losing the first few milliseconds of burn time should be fine.


• 
  
• Electric field mill readout: self-explanatory.


• THOR onboard altimeter/data logger. Obviously only for the prototype.

Unrelated project: ScavCode -- it occurs to me that it should really be possible to train an OCR to read, given certain expectations of the list format, well enough to process digital images emailed from a camera or cell phone. Also, I did plan to release the code this year, which is still a worthwhile goal. Look at Gocr and OCRad as backends, and unpaper as a filter. Alternately, look at WeOCR web service.

The original difficulty is that XEphem ships with a modified form of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, which violates the license on that dataset. Since nobody stepped up to prepare a distributable version, e.g. using a freely distributable star catalogue, it was dropped after Woody. The new conflicting x11-common seems to have spurred some interest (bug discussion), and there does exist (for example) an EDB of the Hipparcos stars that would work legally. Apparently the Ubuntu users already knew this.

Longer term it would make sense to integrate XEphem into the stardata-common work by Kevin McCarty et al, which really shouldn't be too hard. If we're going to put in that sort of effort, it shouldn't be much work to create free alternatives to the planetary surface images and other extras distributed with the commerical version of XEphem, either.

Which brings me around to another tangent: given what an enormous pain such packages can be, wouldn't it make Debian a natural choice for astronomy if one could Debianize the installation and maintenance of things like Aips and IRAF? Someday I might be inspired to think about such horrors.

The New York Times Newsroom Navigator has been around for a while.

Pay particular attention to:

• "Rocket-Triggered Lightning Experiments at Camp Blanding, Florida", in Proc. of the V Int. Symp. on Lightning Protection (SIPDA V), Sao Paulo, Brazil, May 17-21, 1999, pp. 373-394, V.A. Rakov.
  
• "Attachment Process in Rocket-Triggered Lightning Strokes", J. Geophys. Res., 104, 2141-2150, 1999, D. Wang, V.A. Rakov, M.A. Uman, N. Takagi, T. Watanabe, D. Crawford, K.J. Rambo, G.H. Schnetzer, R.J. Fisher, and Z.-I. Kawasaki.
  
• "Lightning Makes Glass" , Journal of the Glass Art Society, pp. 45-50, 1999, V.A. Rakov.
  

The most effective technique for triggering lightning involves launching a small rocket trailing a thin grounded wire toward a charged cloud overhead. This triggering method is sometimes called "classical" triggering and is illustrated in Fig. 1. The cloud charge is indirectly sensed by measuring the electric field at ground, with values of 4 to 10 kV/m generally being good indicators of favorable conditions for lightning initiation. When the rocket, ascending at about 200 m/s, is about 200 to 300 m high, the field enhancement near the rocket tip launches a positively charged (for the common summer thunderstorm having predominantly negative charge at 5 to 7 km altitude) leader that propagates upward toward the cloud. This leader vaporizes the trailing wire and initiates a so-called "initial continuous current" of the order of several hundred amperes that effectively transports negative charge from the cloud charge source via the wire trace to the instrumented triggering facility. There often follows, after the cessation of the initial continuous current, several downward dart leader/upward return stroke sequences traversing the same path to the triggering facility.

V. A. Rakov, SIPDA V

Marcy-Holmes to Phalen Park, 12.3 miles: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=285589. Takes me 70 minutes each way. Pretty gentle throughout eastbound; the hairpin turn in Wheelock is a nasty hill going west, but it's made up for by the fact that the route is entirely downhill from the St. Paul campus.

Jess's place to the East Bank campus, using only beginner-level bicycle commuting routes: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=286299.

13.3 miles total, but this can be cut short just shy of 10 miles by transferring to a Campus Connector on the St. Paul campus. The diversion from Como at 27th is just to avoid loose gravel on the road from ongoing construction, which also affects 15th at the moment. The gravel actually starts at around 29th, but the freshly widened sidewalks are good for avoiding it, as are the nice wide sidewalks that line most of 15th. One would hope the entire situation would clear up on its own, but given the apparent pace of work that will take a while.

It seems to me that getting this off the ground could be logistically tricky, but given ScavHunt's standing, it shouldn't be hard to actually recruit the sort of students who would go for this. On the other hand, mixing high-school students with ScavHunt might be a recipe for the sort of shenanigans that would attract the Administration's attention very quickly.

The first step to change that is to keep the group in more active communication. Social networking tools could play a role here. A FIST blog community, for instance, as a natural outgrowth of e.g. the commenters on Connor's Blue Skies Falling could go a long way. So I'll send a poll to the FIST list shortly after the hunt asking if people would be interested in this, what format they'd prefer (blogspot, LJ community, wiki with forums, Facebook linkage, other).

The second step is to immerse myself in similar community structures in Minneapolis, and get away from the model of living out of my desk space in the lab. This will require that I be more directed and efficient in my research, so that my evenings are more routinely my own. It will also require that I identify and explore the social venues that provide the physical milieux for such communities.

• Simple. A calendar and some to-do lists would really do it. My email program has all my addresses, my phone contains all my phone numbers, so the whole contact management stuff is unnecessary.
• The calendar needn't do that much. J-Pilot does nearly all I need, except I'd like some little applet I could painlessly leave open to do alarms.
• To-do lists look simple, but aren't. I want a basic bullet list that I can sort by date or priority. I want to be able to expand tasks into sub-tasks, a la Project schedules or *STeP directory panes. I want to be able to have a list of Big Goals, like papers and programs and other writing projects for the year. But the same interface should let me jot out a list of stuff for the week, or even just the evening. It would be cool to pull these little things out of bigger lists and have updates link back, but I don't know if I'd seriously use that.
• Portable-centralized-distributed: J-Pilot ties me to the system with the program, so it only gets used for stuff that happens at my desktop. That's why I stopped using its to-do lists -- those I want to carry around. A web app (wiki, at simplest) has an interface that's limited by the browser; though AJAX helps, not all platforms support a powerful enough browser, and native interfaces aren't a bad thing. So I'm thinking a central repository on a server somewhere with RCS-ish semantics that speaks XML in HTTP/multipart messages. A client app checks out the current state and caches; mods can be merged/synched in anytime later. Maybe with a secondary IMAP or other heartbeat protocol to push update alerts.
• With a family of related client apps, formats become less of a problem. A web app could be a client, but so could my little alarm applet or a full-blown Evolution-esque beast. So could a form generator to spit out a printable grocery or errand list, or a .pdb generator to stick lists or calendar stuff into a Palm, etc.
• To reduce the amount of data passed around, certainly compressed HTTP bodies are good. Clients should probably be able to ask for a window of dates of interest. Doing real diffs would require real revision tracking, which might not be worthwhile, but if there's a file representation of the backstore somewhere, rsync-like tricks could work.

This seems like something that is surely a solved problem somewhere, but I haven't seen it. For some reason, I want to call it VILMA if I wind up writing it. The last bit stands for Life Management App, but the VI eludes me. Very Intuitive? Probably not.

Apropos the NSA blowup, WaPo article on the FBI's use of secuity letters and databases worrying people. A little dated, but still relavant.

Old vs new in Tallinn. This goes with NYT on technology boom in Tallinn.

NYT on Frisco to illustrate my extreme reluctance to get a car. This op-ed takes an interesting position on energy environmentalism.

Dynamical simulations of the universe predict a "cosmic web" of dark matter filaments (carrying baryonic matter as well) draining into nodes (clusters) as the universe expands. Recent research (e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0509262) shows that we can sort of detect these filaments by looking at the dynamics of distant clouds. This is pretty much the Ly-alpha forest.

In our own group of galaxies, we might be able to see this mass draining out of the filaments and into our mini-node (are we really a node, or more of a knot along a filament?). Maybe the high-velocity extragalactic clouds are really filamentary material? (http://www.atnf.csiro.au/pasa/17_1/putman/paper/node3.html and then http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v28n4/aas189/abs/S061002.html -- notice the lack of refereed papers on this so far.)

There are, however, papers (ADS) showing that we are starting to have a decent handle on dark matter in the local group, so resolving the filament structure might not be that far off.

And once you start looking at extragalactic gas in detail, you start noticing some really odd stuff. (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0409359)