Fire season comes early?
June 25, 2008What kind amazes me is how relatively inconspicuous the urban areas are
Archive for the ‘tidbits’ Category
Who woulda thunk it?
June 25, 2008Oil Price Fallout: Jobs Coming Home?
“Cheap labor in China doesn’t help you when you gotta pay so much to bring the goods over,” says economist Jeff Rubin.
Some local manufacturers have suddenly found themselves in the thick of boom times.
“In December, we had three employees here. We were just getting set up. Now it’s 14,” says Casey Hearn, who owns a furniture manufacturing business in North Carolina.
Other sectors of U.S. manufacturing may see a boost in jobs as well. Rubin says the U.S. steel industry is poised to reap benefits.
“It’s not just about labor costs anymore,” says Rubin. “Distance costs money, and when you have to shift iron ore from Brazil to China and then ship it back to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is looking pretty good at 40 bucks an hour.”
Well, pretty much anyone who had any sense.
Want to know the real kicker here? Shipping bits is cheap, so it could be that soon white-collar jobs are the only ones it makes sense to outsource. Until the dollar falls a little more, that is.
We’re sure who you are, and — oops, you’re dead.
June 25, 2008Health care applications of autoidentification technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), have been proposed to improve patient safety and also the tracking and tracing of medical equipment. However, electromagnetic interference (EMI) by RFID on medical devices has never been reported.
There are probably ways to make readers that won’t shut off or reset other piece of medical equipment, but eek.
Whistling outlawed in Scotland
June 23, 2008But only if you make hand gestures while you do it.
Flirty texting could land Scots in jail for 10 years | The Register
The offence will be committed if someone sends an unsolicited text message to someone else which a court finds was designed to give the sender sexual gratification or to humiliate, distress or alarm the receiver.
Causing a person to see or hear an indecent communication is also an offence. It can be committed by reading “a passage in a book or magazine” or by communicating the sounds of actual or simulated sexual activity or by communicating in sign language.
It will be up to prosecutors and courts to decide which communications are serious enough to warrant the heavy jail terms,
I have mixed feeling about this. On the one hand harassment for sexual purposes is just as criminal as harassment for any other purpose. But in a country where judges can go easy on pedophiles who only boff particularly seductive six-year-olds, I don’t feel all that good about the discretion that’s going to be exercised.
30 picowatts is not a lot of power to scavenge
June 17, 2008Microchip sets low-power record with extreme sleep mode
The system defaults to sleep. A low-power timer acts as an alarm clock on perpetual snooze, waking Phoenix every ten minutes for 1/10th of a second to run a set of 2,000 instructions. The list includes checking the sensor for new data, processing it, compressing it into a sort of short-hand, and storing it before going back to sleep.
The timer “isn’t an atomic clock,” Hanson said. “We keep time to 10 minutes plus or minus a few tenths of a second. For the applications this is designed for, that’s okay. You don’t need absolute accuracy in a sensor. We’ve traded that for enormous power savings.”
A unique power gate design is an important part of the sleep strategy. Power gates block the electric current from parts of a chip not essential for memory during sleep.
In typical state-of-the-art chips, power gates are wide with low resistance to let through as much electric current as possible when the device is turned on. These chips wake up quickly and run fast, but a significant amount of electric current leaks through in sleep mode.
Phoenix engineers used much narrower power gates that restrict the flow of electric current. That strategy, coupled with the deliberate use of an older process technology, cut down on energy leaks.
Of course if you read between the lines, the 1:6000 duty cycle pretty much says it all. Actually running the processor takes 180 microwatts or so, which is way less than a Core Duo but still a pile of energy. I’d like to see one that runs of some kind of scavenged mechanical power — this would be particularly useful for the kinds of sensor applications they talk about, because during interesting events there will almost certainly be more power to scavenge and you could run a faster cycle.
Because the Times has not yet discovered the 3d dimension
June 17, 2008Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol - Times Online
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
Obviously if you can feed the things on something you don’t want (i.e. not corn or any other food) you’re in good shape — roughly as good as with cellulosic ethanol.
Back of the envelope says 143 billion liters is 143 million cubic meters, which is 143 meters high by a kilometer on a side. That sounds rather smaller (depending on how it’s divvied up) that the volume occupied by refineries at the moment. Of course, you’d also need to be moving roughly that volume of biomass around…
Poor Guy
June 17, 2008Gothamist: Avid Subway Enthusiast Arrested Again
Darius McCollum, the minor cult figure among train buffs and subway enthusiasts, was arrested again this morning after being caught in a restricted area at Columbus Circle . McCollum is such a well known figure, that police recognized him on sight boarding an uptown 1 train at Times Square wearing a blue transit worker-like uniform and gloves that bore a NYC Transit patch. They followed him when got off the train at Columbus Circle and arrested him when he bypassed a barricade at the station.
This probably means that the hardest non-working man in NYC Transit could be headed back to Sing Sing. He pleaded guilty to attempting to steal a locomotive when caught in a LIRR railyard in 2005, but was released in 2006. He was re-imprisoned for violating his parole when he was caught possessing railroad property.
It really is sad that they can’t just hire him and be done with it.
It’s 2005 in Australia
June 17, 2008Aussies deploy bovine facial recognition | The Register
University of Queensland researcher and cowcam co-inventor, Neal Finch, explained: “We use the unique side profile that every animal has and a software programme similar to facial recognition technology that allows us to identify animals to a species level. The camera can tell the difference between sheep and cattle and feral pests such as goats, horses, pigs, kangaroos, camels and emus.
“You could have a cattle station that has feral populations of horses, donkeys or camels. The watering points are there for the cattle, so the camera would let the cattle through, but if a goat or a pig tried to get in the gate would shut against it.”
That’s when this image-processing cat door made the rounds.
this is what it sees when Flo sticks her head in from the street. The image is captured as soon as the center of the picture becomes dark. At this point our software analyses the image to determine if Flo is carrying anything in her mouth.
Of course, unless the feral animals are good enough to come alone and never zip through underneath a cow or right after it, beforethe gate closes, this thing would be a great idea.
There’s enough image tracking and processing power around that you could just dart the offending critters when they try to come in.
Brilliant
June 17, 2008Compressed web phone calls are easy to bug - tech - 12 June 2008 - New Scientist Tech
The new compression technique, called variable bitrate compression produces different size packets of data for different sounds.
That happens because the sampling rate is kept high for long complex sounds like “ow”, but cut down for simple consonants like “c”. This variable method saves on bandwidth, while maintaining sound quality.
VoIP streams are encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. However, a team from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, has shown that simply measuring the size of packets without decoding them can identify whole words and phrases with a high rate of accuracy.
Gotta love the back channels.
Want, don’t want
June 13, 2008Wall Racers: Wall Cars Will Race Automagically for Eternity
This is what happens when you get a couple of cheap RC cars and add proximity sensors, extra batteries, robot brains, and name them Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds: totally-automated racing all around your house. These electric robocars can detect the walls around them and race against each other for as long as the batteries last. The resulting Tron-lightcycle-like action is impressive.
Want! Can’t wait for the instructions
Superconductor electric vehicle ::: Pink Tentacle
Sumitomo’s motor uses high-temperature superconducting wires instead of the copper wire typically used in the coils in electric vehicle motors. When cooled to an extremely low temperature, electrical resistance and current loss are reduced to nearly zero, so the motor can operate with greater energy efficiency and torque — in other words, the motor uses less electricity to do the same amount of work. The company says the prototype vehicle can travel 10% farther than conventional electric vehicles running on the same type of battery.
Because the hassle of liquid-nitrogen cooling is definitely worth a 10% improvement in performance. Don’t want.
