Will Defense & Baserunning Get Their Due?

Maybe, thanks to this very cool technology. Although limiting release of data to the public because of teams' "competitive concerns" is just plain dumb. Trust me, MLB franchises; if your shortstop sucks, the fans (especially the stat geeks) will already know it. This system will just act as confirmation.

Still, no matter how quickly technology progresses, the best fielding still has to be seen to be believed.

Can The Small Stuff Add Up?

When it comes to climate change and reducing carbon footprints, most attention is paid to the big-ticket items: wind farms, solar, hybrid vehicles, battery technology. But could capturing portions of lost energy be as worthwhile, collectively, as pursuing the big targets? From the heat energy lost in the normal operation of the typical combustion engine, to the energy absorbed by the ground as it's walked on, to the flushing of a toilet - will these sources of "free energy" ever be harnessed at a large enough scale to make a difference? Or will attempts to collect, store, and re-use this energy remain on the fringes of the green movement?

Here's the latest device - similar to the toilet retrofit above - coming soon to a sink near you (?)

Aptera Sighting in DC!

I almost missed it b/c I was looking the wrong way, but then noticed everyone else on 17th Street staring at the same thing...Aptera is in DC to chat with some politicians about (what else, these days?) loans, manufacturing loans to be specific.

I was just getting used to seeing Smart cars every once in a while, but this was much cooler to see in person; the first future-car technology that I've seen - live, in motion, on a city street - that actually looks like it belongs in the future.

B/c Mr. Grau requested, nay, demanded it, more info on Aptera:

Their web site. Not a lot of concrete stats or numbers yet, but they're supposedly forthcoming. They're also rumored to be delivering the first production model to a real-life customer by the end of this month! Sales to California residents only, though. They're also going t have two initial versions of their 2-seater, an all-electric and a hybrid. They've hinted at a regular ICE as well, possibly in two flavors (gasoline and vanilla, um, diesel).

Here's the test drive by Road & Track last month. They really liked it!

Cabin Noise

Considering (1) how inconsiderate some people can be when using their mobile phones in public and (2) that assaulting another airline passenger during these days of the Bush-Cheney regime could get you shipped to Guantanamo, this bill seems like a great idea to me. I even like the name! But it's probably only a matter of time before phones on U.S. flights are a reality; they're already allowed on planes in other parts of the world, after all.

Meanwhile, 200 Miles Overhead....

The ISS (International Space Station) may be visible tonight around 8. Wonder if we have a good shot at actually seeing it in the city, considering all the light pollution.

A Tale of Two Weekends

First, the Bad: Taking 3.5-to-4 hours to drive the 90 miles from Baltimore to Hershey, PA for the Police show. Jenny having to go into the office both Saturday and Sunday. The HP critical BIOS update that killed the motherboard (I'm finished with buying computers, I'll just build my own from now on unless it's a laptop; fewer headaches, believe it or not). Me wasting time on a beautiful day on Saturday on the fool's errand of trying to recover the BIOS.

Ah, but there was Good: The Police, LIVE! - review forthcoming. Cal's whiskey-tasting event, which was much fun. The weather, which didn't suck, for once.

High Definition

To go with our new HDTV (Panasonic plasma) that was delivered Friday, we switched from DirecTV to the other satellite provider, Dish Network. They have more HD channels - for now - plus are a few bucks cheaper per month. But we found one caveat - and we think Dish Network was slightly misleading about it when Jenny set up everything over the phone - they don't offer local broadcast channels in HD, we need a separate antenna for that. We weren't too happy when we discovered that, but I still think we would have switched to Dish even if we had known that in advance. Besides, we can always switch back (in 18 months) if we really want to. Then again, in 18 months, it will be 2009 and the HDTV landscape is bound to look very different.

New Auto Technology, Russian Spirits

This neat article from Wired summarizes a few of the latest future-car concepts and engine/drivetrain technology, but to me it really drives home one of the biggest casualties of the Global Warming / Peak Oil / Energy Dependence crises - it's killing the flying car. We were supposed to have flying cars by now. Actually, I think we were supposed to get them sometime back in the 80's. But it didn't happen then, and now it's even less likely. The first few flying car prototypes are bound to be quite fossil-fuel-hungry, so how are they supposed to get off the ground by using fuel cells and electric motors? At this rate, no flying cars in my lifetime. But maybe personal hovercraft are the wave of the future, what with all the melting and expected sea level rise.

Don't worry though, all is right with the world - Russians will still drink just about anything.

UPDATE: Strange, I mention personal hovercraft in the initial entry, and look what I find a few hours later!

U.S. Fiber, Crippled Networks?

I know several people in the DC/Baltimore area who are in the Verizon FiOS service area, and have been hooked up with new fiber optic transmission of both digital TV and internet service starting at 5 Mbps for $40/month (up to 30 MBps for - holy shit! - $180/month). People are excited about this, because they can now ditch their despised Comcast cable, and also upgrade thier broadband speed, all the while saving some money. Now, we ditched Comcast years ago, and went with DirecTV's decent performance and solid customer service, and are also happy with our Verizon DSL, which is reliable if unspectacular. But FiOS would clearly be an upgrade, so I went online to try to nail down a schedule on when it may be coming to Baltimore City.

Well, I didn't find that schedule, but I did find plenty else. Over a year ago, I bitched about how France, among other places, had cheaper and better TV & internet service, by far, than we do in the states. Apparently, our broadband infrastructure itself is coming up short when compared with other developed countries. This page spells it all out, and spreads the blame around between the Baby Bells (Verizon, AT&T, etc.), mergers, FCC inaction and incompetence, and state governments afraid or unwilling to hold these corporations to their contracts. No surprise there, after all it's popular these days for governments to abdicate their utility and infrastructure resposibilities to corporations; look at red light cameras, privately operated toll roads, and the deregulated power grid. Then there's always cable "competition", and...oh hell it's Friday, I don't feel like dwelling on the same old bullshit politics, let's move on.

So what about the numbers behind Teletruth.org's accusations? $6.63 per Mbps (vs. $0.34 in Korea and $0.41 in Japan)? Going by the current FiOS price structure, at the cheapest monthly rate - assuming the maximum advertised 5 Mbps download speeds - that's $8/Mbps. Moving up to the $180/month 30 Mbps, the math is still easy - $6/Mbps. Not a pretty picture, and Verizon's fiber is still a better deal than AT&T's U-verse (formerly Lightspeed, both stupid names), which as far as I can tell only offers up to 6 Mbps. AT&T also bundles their price with the TV component, so it's difficult to figure out how much each Mbps costs, but it looks to be somewhat more expensive than FiOS.

How about the claim that the U.S. is 16th in broadband according to the ITU? Let's take a look at the current numbers, shall we? According to their growth rate metric, whatever the hell that means, we're actually ranked 13th in the world. But looking at the Network Index, the ITU measurement of fixed phone lines, mobile subscribers, and internet bandwidth per capita, the U.S. drops down to 23rd.

Is FiOS still a good thing? Sure, you take what you can get, and it's probably preferable to dealing with Comcast, Adelphia, or any of the regional cable fiefdoms. But it sure would be nice if we weren't being left in the dust by Asia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. The most frustrating aspect is that it seems like an infrastructure problem that could have been avoided, given better decision-making and some FCC backbone.

Tunneling

A big part of my job right now is building and running simulations to support the design of sewer overflow storage tunnels in DC. There are similar tunnel systems in Detroit, Chicago, and a handful of other places, and most of them are massive. DC is no exception; tunnel diameters from 15 to 30+ feet, depths of up to 100 feet below the surface. They're built using tunnel boring machines (TBMs), which are used for all large diameter tunneling projects these days, including road/transit tunnels.

Maybe I'm just a big engineering geek, but these things are pretty damn cool. They're custom-made for each job, taking into account desired diameter and rock/soil conditions. They not only do the drilling, but the apparatus behind the drills lines the tunnel also. And my understanding is that since they're usually expensive to extract once the job is done (plus since they're custom-made, re-use isn't likely), they're left in the ground when the drilling is complete. Eleven of these beasts were used on the Channel Tunnel.

Here's a promotional video that shows how these babies work.

Big Brother is a Moron

Here's a real shocker: the RFID chips in California state legislature IDs are apparently not so secure.

This is quite a comfort, considering that the U.S. government recently started issuing e-passports with RFID technology on-board. So if you're in the market for a new passport or passport renewal, you might want to invest in some protection.

(PS - if I mysteriously disappear after this post, it's probably because BB - aka Dick Cheney - was probably not pleased about the title; see you in Room 101...)

Hottest Show on TV, Netvibes

Anyone else out there a regular Hell's Kitchen viewer? What a fantastic "reality" show, and it's all thanks to the star, Scottish celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. He exhibits the perfect blend of cruely, profanity, and condescension. His tirades are just incredible to behold, they seem so very sincere (and terrifying).

Netvibes is a web-based aggregator that lets users subscribe to RSS feeds, mail accounts, links, photo pages, even podcasts - although I'm still sticking with iTunes, for now - all on a single web page (with multiple tabs). I've been using it for about a week now, and I like it a lot; one tab for gmail, del.icio.us links, news links and weather, one tab for all my friends' blogs, another tab for other blogs I try to keep up with, and a fourth tab for flickr pages and video links. Check it out, and please let me know if you use something similar that you really like.

25 MPH Electric Car Doesn't Cut It

In the same way that huge SUVs can adversely affect others' safety, and also effectively limits car buying choices, this all-electric car with a top speed of 25 mph is a similarly bad idea. Just as driving an Excursion or a Suburban means that anyone who buys a small car lives in fear of getting mashed into the grille on the highway, drivers on city streets shouldn't have to worry about minor accidents caused by a car without enough power to get up hills, which have the potential to become major accidents because the car is designated as a Low Speed Vehicle (and thus is exempt from airbags). Besides, who drives the speed limit in 25 mph zones anyway? Typical speeds in these zones are 30-35 mph; 25 mph is really incredibly slow. There are humans that can run about that fast, and if a cheetah happened to be chasing you, it would be able to catch you twice and still have some speed to spare. I'm all for low-emission vehicles, but this one just strikes me as a flawed product with extremely limited usefulness. Hell, tamed cheetahs with saddles would be a better idea.

Now That's Some Good Mileage

I found this company through WIRED News' Autopia blog; they're building a hybrid car that gets 330 MPG. Sure beats the hell out of the Prius!

(Haven't posted in a while b/c I've been bothered by a cold over the past week, and thus haven't felt suitably inspired. Almost back to 100%, so entries should be back to their usual frequency, whatever that may be.)

Graphical Ads Coming For Google

Greg alerted me to this in a comment from a previous post. Yuck. That's putting it a bit more mildly than this blogger.

No big deal though - once the Google/AOL banner ads start appearing on Google search results, just go to Tools -> Options -> Content tab -> Exceptions button next to 'Load Images' -> Address of web site: google.com -> Block button. There, future Google-corruption crisis averted! This is assuming you're using Firefox - maybe IE has a similar feature, but I don't use IE so I wouldn't know.

AOL Instant Messenger No More!

I'm switching to Google Talk. No more pop-up windows or auto-loading web pages when logging in. Nice clean uncluttered interface (it is a Google product after all). And hopefully the end of monthly software upgrades. I'll probably still keep AIM around until I've adequately badgered friends and loved ones into switching, but its time as the IM client of choice is coming to an end. After all, it's competing with Google now - resistance is futile.

Google Blog Search

I'm just messing around on the computer before bed, so I head on over to blogsearch.google.com , which I've never used before. I type in underchuckle, pultoblog, and a few others I know should be in there. Greg's blog checks out fine, as do a few others; the most recent posts show up. But for some reason Charm City Blogger isn't indexed beyond September 5th. What gives?

The real reason that I was testing Google's blogsearch, is that I found an intriguing new Firefox extension that shows which blogs are linking to the web page that's being visited. So if you're reading an article about our remedial president's speech last night, it will list all the blue-stater blogger rants and red-state raves, all in a convenient pop-up window (easily disabled) in the lower right corner! Neat-O.

Whole Week of Stuff, Windows Hatred, and More

I just typed up this long entry about my whole week, it was a great post that was all ready to go. So I hit the publish button, and Mozilla crashes. I lose it all. I love Windows machines. They are so fucking fabulous. I need to start saving up my pennies for a PowerBook, that way I can leave all this bullshit behind. Now of course this entry won't be nearly as good, because I'm all pissed off. Hey, if Google owns Blogger, why don't they have an autosave function like they do with Gmail? They do have a 'Recover Post' option, but I'm not sure when it should be used - it didn't work this time. Still, it all goes back to those asses at Microsoft.

Eight days since the last post, but there are reasons for that. Busy last weekend, busy this past week, and now at the start of this weekend, finally getting some breathing room. Let's see, last weekend we received a house guest in the form of my furry little brother Hobbes, my parents' cat, when they left from Baltimore on a Caribbean cruise. He's doing OK, hanging out with Maya and Marty, but the last few days he've definitely been restless. I think he's ready to go home. Halloween party as Liz and Jarriel's last Saturday, I'll have photos up next post. Sunday went to a craptastic DC United playoff game; the home team played about as badly as they possibly could, very disappointing. This week at work was crazy too, since Washington was hosting WEFTEC, the water industry's biggest annual conference/exhibition.

So here I am, a Friday night at home, blogging on the shitty laptop (Jenny/Moonflower is in MC so I can't use the desktop - no, for those not into WoW, I don't have the patience to explain that tonight, sorry). Actually, other than the technical problems, it's been a relaxing evening at home, certainly nothing wrong with that. I did get some painting done earlier, I'm trying to get the dining room finished this weekend. We'll see what happens.

The original, pre-crash post included a short review of The Satanic Verses, which I finished a few days ago on the train ride home. I'll save that for a future post, I just don't feel like re-creating it right now. One more post coming up tonight, Halloween costume pics. I'll be right back...

Vampire iPods

Don't get me wrong, I really like my iPod mini, even if it has been rendered somewhat obsolete by the iPod nano. And as most of you are well aware, I've always enjoyed a good Halloween costume. But I must draw the line at paying $40 for a costume for my iPod, no matter how cute it is.

Neat Map Project

I dig maps (who doesn't?), so I'm stoked about the Common Census web site, which takes user input such as where you live and what locality and big city you closely identify with, and creates a U.S. map based on major cities' spheres of influence. So check out the site and enter your data - the more data points the better.

AND for sports fans, it's got a sports map also that attempts to map out spheres of influence for pro and college sports teams. So far, only the NFL and MLB maps are available, but they both show some unexpected, if somewhat intuitive, results. On the NFL map, check out the Green Bay Packer's area down in Mississippi and northern Louisiana (Brett Favre hails from MS). And on the MLB map, there must be a lot of Chicago-area retirees itn Arizona, because it's evidently Cubs country out there. It's also worth noting that after 2,500 entries for the MLB map, Diamondback fans are non-existent, while the Devil Rays do have actual fans!

What would be really fascinating, was if this project collected data for 10, 20, 50, 100 years. How would the city spheres and sports team 'boundaries' change? Would identification with cities change with the economy/real estate market/job growth/etc.? And would the sports boundaries correlate with winning percentage, as would be expected? I couldn't help but notice the Orioles' area is very small, appropriate for eight straight losing seasons, while the new team on the block, the Nationals, have a huge area that currently stretches into he Carolinas. Would the Mets' area in the late 60s and early 70s have rivaled that of the Yankees? How huge was the Reds' area in the mid 70s, or the Twins in the late 80s? Are associations with metro areas and sports teams more fluid on the coasts, where one would expect that people are more transient than in Central and Mountain states?

Perhaps the coolest thing about this map project is that the founder of the site, some guy originally from "Up-State" New York with a poly-sci degree who now lives in Rio de Janeiro, conceived the idea over a barbecue lunch one day. Does this mean that I should try to do more deep thinking during my lunch breaks?