Morning Coffee Notes
While reading blogs I just noticed (while following a Condi link) in Asparagirl's blog that President Buchanon was gay, or at least there are rumors to that effect. Odd the little things that drift up to the surface.

More potential drugs: Tricolsan, the active ingredient in many anti-bacterial soaps, may also be effective against sleeping sickness. It has already shown some effectiveness against malaria. As a well established antibiotic the safety considerations are well known. Efficacy testing may show this to be fairly important as a source of low cost treatment for some very devastating diseases.

The oddity is that neither malaria nor sleeping sickness are bacterial diseases. Genetic analysis of these diseases has shown that they still utilize some of the same chemical pathways as bacteria. So people are now trying out antibiotics that attack those pathways.

802.11a Interference
There has been recent renewal of discussions about the conflicts between 802.11a and radars. There are several kinds of radars involved and the following may explain why unlicensed operation using 802.11 style sharing will cause problems.

The first thing to understand is that the radars do not have the same degree of flexibility that communications systems have. The physical properties of weather, airplanes, etc. constrain the radars to operate in certain freqency ranges for certain purposes. The frequencies near 5-6 GHz are needed for some kinds of radars.

Airport area weather radars: These radars work by detecting the faint echoes from insects, dust, plant fragments, and other small targets in the atmosphere. They have extensive noise elimination to deal with the well established noise sources like ground reflections and fixed frequency sources. But these noise eliminators will not remove an 802.11 style signal. It will get through and swamp the echoes from the small targets. The effect at the radar operation is like drawing a blank line from the radar to the interferer and on out to the full range of the radar. All of the data on this line is lost. The radars can determine that they lost the faint signals that they normally use, so they blank out these jammed areas.

The scan patterns for these radars vary significantly depending upon their location. The radar may sometimes do a sector scan, going back and forth over a 90 degree angle. It may do this for just a low level scan, or it may do a series of higher elevation angles. The radar beam sweeps across any one specific location at intervals of 10s to 150s. Others operate in full circle coverage, where the return rate ranges from 30s to 600s.

This is a long window of silence, and current 802.11 logic would assume that the frequency was free for use. So every 802.11 user would be generating a blank line on the radar display. A small number of interfering 802.11 users would not cause serious problems. One or two blank lines does not interfere much with detecting dangerous weather. Dozens or hundreds of blank lines could make these radars quite useless.

The 802.11 system could detect the radar pulses and could shift frequencies. But it would need to be more sensitive and much quicker to shift than current systems. The dwell time of the radar is in the 25-50 millisecond range. To leave 90% of that time free of interference, the 802.11 system would need to shift to another unused frequency within a few milliseconds.

Before people get too excited about 802.11a causing airplane crashes, I should note that it does not use the same frequencies as aviation weather radars. Those frequencies require licenses. The aviation radars operate in a number of different narrow channels so that with proper license management there can be overlapping radar coverage without mutual interference. The military concern is that they use some frequencies that are proposed for 802.11a expansion. The FAA will become very concerned if the 802.11a expansion is modified and encroaches on the frequencies that are presently used for aviation weather radar.

Bi-Static Radar: These radars have a separate transmitter and receiver. The separation distance varies but can easily be several kilometers. There are definite advantages to separating the two in some situations. For example, they are much better able to detect stealth targets. The normal operation is illustrated below where a transmitted signal reflects at an angle off the target to be picked up by the receiver.


The interference problem arises when there is a signal source transmitting somewhere on the line between the target and the receiving antenna. This interference source is unaware of the transmissions because they are aimed in another direction. But the direct signal power from an active transmitter can easily swamp the much weaker signals that are reflected from the target.

The angles involved make it impossible for the 802.11 style sharing to work. The interfering system is not in the beam of the transmitter, so it does not know that it should shift frequencies to avoid interfering.

Low Probability of Interception (LPI) radars: These radars are designed to be hard to detect. This poses obvious problems for any system that depends upon mutual cooperation for frequency sharing.

Possible Solutions

Power management: All of these radars are designed to operate with a certain level of interference. There is natural interference at these frequencies. If the power levels of the 802.11 systems is kept low enough, they will be below the noise thresholds that the radars can tolerate. The problem with this is enforcement. Despite existing power management regulations for current 802.11 systems, people routinely attach illegal antennas and make unlicensed modifications to improve their range or throughput. To be acceptable at 5GHz, the power management must keep levels low even when users make the illegal modifications that can be anticipated.

The sensitivity of the radars is such that this might be a significant waste of potential bandwidth. One of the attractions of the 5 GHz band is the potential for higher power and greater range. This leads to the possibility that pre-coordination through a new form of license management might be the better solution, in combination with the unlicensed low power version that stays within the current 802.11a and 802.11b bands.

Efficient Licensing: There is a great deal of wasted bandwidth in the current systems. For example, in the current system one radar using channel X locks down all use of channel X in that region. It could also then activate fast licensing for channel X for point to point links in that region. Each link would only need to be geometrically verified as not pointing too close to the radar site. If each endpoint had a 10 degree antenna only those odd pairs of sites that happen to line up with the radar site would fail to get licenses. With a 10 degree antenna and large safety zones, there is a 90% probability that an antenna is pointed in a safe direction. This would permit extensive construction of low cost branch and mesh networks. The links would need to be verified as not interfering, but this could be handled efficiently.

The present licensing system does not accomodate this kind of licensing, but it could be changed. Introducing a rapid evaluation and approval system would be a big change for a stubborn bureaucracy, so it will only happen if there are powerful forces demanding the change. Freeing a substantial slow at 5GHz for fast licensing of long distance and high capacity point to point links might be such a force.

Two Towers (LOTR)
Gollum is an amazing creation. What a work of art. A overall good movie, though not quite as good in my opinion as the first episode. But the epic battles are epic.

Several of the surrounding movie theatres have closed in the past few years. Now the one theatre within walking distance is no longer competing with the others for new releases. It is getting most of the new movies. And it is a nice old theatre, built for movies and before the sardine can style. The seating is comfortable and the views are good. The new stadium style seating is better, but this is one that I can walk to.

The opening night crowd was smaller than I expected. But perhaps it is because it is a Wednesday. I do hope that the word gets around soon enough that this theatre stays open.

Morning Coffee Notes
Blogs as a coffee shop: This morning's coffee shop discussion focussed on accidents involving construction equipment falling into septic tanks, with associated jokes and hilarity. Sometimes it covers local politics, local business, etc.

Bloggers like to talk about influencing events, but I think that their role is more like the morning coffee shop. It does two things:

• It provides a focus for local interests. This can sometimes lead to involvement by reporters, etc. Blogs are a lot more convenient to check than coffee shops, and so are proportionately more important to the news organizations. They can check blogs to discover "what are people talking about" much more easily than checking a few thousand coffee shops, etc.
• It provides a forum to develop and refine new ideas, much as coffee shops, salons, etc. have done for a couple centuries. It merges nicely into the old pamphleteering era of the 19th century.

Heat pump water heater versus direct heating: I did the numbers. Most direct heat (gas and oil) is 80% efficient. The heat pump has an EER of 2.5. This means that if the conversion of heat into electricity is 32% efficient then the same amount of gas or oil would be consumed generating the electricity as would be used in direct heat. Old clunkers are down at 32%. New coal systems are close to 40% and combined cycle gas is up over 60%. So the heat pump uses less fuel than the direct heating, even after efficiency losses in the electrical system.

The added consideration of building heating or cooling needs complicates things. But this looks like once it gets well established it is a significant win for warm climates.

Later Notes
The mall: Given traffic and parking, I make the entirely unscientific predicition that retail sales this season will be about the same as last season. It was busy and nearly full parking, but no traffic jams. On the other hand, I normally see only one or two "stupid driver tricks" per week. Today I saw more than a dozen.

Elcomsoft: Acquitted, as reported all over the place. Good news.

Morning Coffee Notes
Insulating translucent panels: The Cabot company has gone into production with an aerogel insulated panel. The product is sold as Kalwall. It is fairly amazing stuff. The wall product is a little under 3 inches thick, translucent, and has an insulation rating of R-20.

Aerogel is fairly amazing stuff. I got to play with a little of it from the Stardust science satellite.

Heat pump/ water heater: The old and unpopular approach of using a heat pump for water heating (instead of electrical resistance, gas, or oil) is resurrected again. This new product uses a modified design to reduce the installation and capital costs substantially for a small increase in operating costs. This may move it into the range of being competitive for the home market. The basic concept is to extract heat from the building air to heat the water. This is a double benefit when you want the cooler air that results, and a further heating burden when you need to heat the location. For warmer climates this is a definite win.

Extra-Solar planetary creation
The planets were probably created in a period measured in thousands rather than millions of years. With more than 100 extra-solar planets discovered, the theoreticians are coming up with interesting results. There is some new work on the creation of the Jovian moons. It follows from a theory of planetary system creation. (For the hard core math freaks this is the original article. The next few decades should be really interesting in astronomy. The excitement may shift from the incredibly distant quasars and edges of the universe to planetary systems in our immediate vicinity.

Tilapia
I decided to check out tilapia and found it an interesting fish farming evolution. I had not known that they were originally African, or how widely they have spread as a farm fish. They have certainly taken off in the US. Now 20% of the fish sold in the US is tilapia. It seems ludicrous, and its probably a waste of resources, but there are tilapia farms in the Arizona and California desert. And, the fish market was out of tilapia when I went to pick some up at lunch.

Argh, Windows is so frustrating
The new wireless mouse from A4tech has a bogus installer for their mouse driver. I installed their device as a USB device. Their idiot installer installed their driver for both the USB and the PS/2. This screwed up the touchpad (which is on the PS/2). So I re-installed the touchpad driver. And now each time I boot the idiot machine wants to re-install the A4Tech driver. SO I cancel it, and the A4Tech driver is already installed and works.

This is partly a rant about incompetent software developers at A4Tech, but also a rant at the poor design philosophy behind Windows that forces me to be a victim of these incompetent developers.

Downeaster first year results
The Downeaster rail service has reached its one year point and surprised people with 40% better ridership than expected. The first year operating subsidy was only $500,000 from the State of Maine. The remainder of the $6,700,000 in costs were covered from ticket sales and a hybrid subsidy and pollution credit system. So Amtrak fully recovered its costs.

The cost figures also show some the extent of the continuing Amtrak management problems. The sales and administration costs for the service were $2.4 million, or about 33% of total costs. That figure is excessive. Amtrak has been shedding hundreds of administrative posts each year for the past several years. Ridership has increased during that period. There is a lot of patronage and inherited mismanagers to be removed.

The revenue figure also includes an unusual bit of pollution credits. There is $1.5 million in pollution credits to reflect the assumption that the riders would have been driving without the train. This kind of credit is not generally available for train travel.

The next steps for the Downeaster are twofold:

1. They are continuing to attempt fare and schedule adjustments to build the mid-week usage. The weekends are doing well.
2. Service extensions past Portland are under discussion. For example, extending to Freeport could increase reverse traffic from Boston to the many outlet stores in Freeport. These also serve various vacation areas.

This success makes the Boston Montreal high speed rail corridor look a little less like a boondoggle. It is still hard to see it being a success, but there might be riders and suitable old rail beds to return to passenger service.

Read your citations!
Another in the round of interesting evaluations of scientific papers. After the fuss with Bellesiles falsifying and inventing data, and that Bell Labs researcher getting caught falsifying data, there is now a study on whether scientific authors actually read the papers that they cite. The early indication is that only 20% are actually read. The rest are cut and pasted from earlier papers' citation lists. This is examined by tracing errors in citations, and noticing that these errors seem to propagate on into many subsequent papers.

See here for the general interest article and for the abstract and full paper see this.

A successful satellite launch
Japan just successfully launched an H2 with the Adeos-2 satellite (and a few small ones. The Adeos adds another sea scatterometer to complement SeaWifs. Nice break in the recent failure cluster. The Block DM failure costs the largest GEO comms satellite to be lost, and then the Ariane 5 was lost just a few days ago. Looks like this year will be 3 fails out of about 60 launches. Launch failures remain persistent.

Scatterometers are also interesting in that they have been part of the everpresent global warming hysteria. They are much better at finding icebergs than previous instruments. They can see through fog and clouds. And it appears that the recent "increase" in huge antarctic icebergs is the result of better detection.

Satellites revealed the many hurricanes that are formed and die at sea without ever hitting land. Meteorologists said "Wow. Cool." But that was then. Now, all is political, so it was all caused by global warming. But eventually the truth emerges.

Laptop Lust
I finally wrote up my description of Linux on a Laptop for the new laptop.

Malaria update
Reported in Lancet (free reg required), via New Scientist, are results of initial tests of a new anti-malarial drug. Early genome sequencing and metabolic analysis indicated that malaria has a different chemical pathway for isoprenoids that is shared with some plants and bacteria. This lead to tests in 1999 using an herbicide devised in the late 1970's. The resulting analysis indicated effectiveness in mice. The first human trials indicate both efficacy and safety. This early test specifically examined plasmodium falciparum in an area in Gabon with very high chloroquinine and sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine resistance. The results are very encouraging and more extensive testing should get funding.

The full genome publication was only months ago. This work started four years ago based on earlier preliminary analysis and other metabolic tests. I worry that people will think that it was all done in a matter of months and have unrealistic expectations about the speed with which genomic analysis yields results.

Morning Coffee Notes
Wireless mice are an interesting technology. Did you know that they operate at 27 MHz? That's way down in the HF band. Mice are using the same frequencies as radio controlled model cars and airplanes. I was not expecting them to be at such a low frequency. In theory, my mouse signals could be spanning half the world (at night when 27 MHz propagation is good). I was expecting to find them up somewhere like 440MHZ or 900 MHz in one of the ISM bands. Those travel in a more or less straight line, don't reflect off the ionosphere, and can only be received within a couple hundred kilometers.

I tracked this down from the FCC registration of my wireless mouse. It turns out that the rated maximum power is 10 mW, so in fact it drops below the noise levels very quickly with distance. My mouse is giving me problems. With fresh batteries and on a reasonable work layout it is fine. With dying batteries or strange workplace (like a hotel bed) the signal gets too weak and problems result. Usually it is missed signals, like button down or button up events being missed. This causes all sorts of computer headaches. If a button up event is missed, the computer thinks that I've pressed down and am dragging the mouse around. Clearing this can be a problem.

Now I also understand some of the FAA concerns. You don't want HF transmitters too close to your electronics. HF can have all kinds of funky interactions.

Global Warming and Global Cooling
Bit by bit the scientists are returning to real science in the climate field. Politicized science either predicts results that satisfy political supporters, or if it must upset them, makes absolutely flawless predictions. The reality of climate understanding is that there is much that is not understood. The models are improving, but they are not reliable.

This is not that different from where weather forecasting was a few decades ago. The models were crude and primitive. The forecasts were unreliable. They were slowly improved to the point they are today, where short term forecasts are quite reliable for larger systems and moderately reliable for fine details like rain-snow lines. Part of what made this work was continuous data gathering of more relevant observations.

The recent Vostok cores are an example of this for climate modeling. Vostok gives unprecedented time resolution of temperature and CO2 levels during the past 400,000 years. They very clearly show the last four ice age cycles. And they do not provide any clear obvious answers.

Most people are aware of the ice age cycles. These show up as a saw tooth pattern in temperature. Each cycle starts with a period of extreme cold followed by a very rapid warming. Then there is a gradual oscillating decline back down to a long period of extreme cold. If the old patterns held perfectly, we would now be slightly past a temperature peak. The current cycle is a little different with a longer but lower temperature peak. At Vostok the peaks were about 2 degrees (C) warmer than present temperatures. The valleys were 10-12 degrees (C) colder than present.

Less well known is that CO2 follows the same up and down pattern. During the warm peaks the CO2 levels reach 280 ppmv, and during the cold periods CO2 levels drop to 180 ppmv. So it is clearly established that CO2 is somehow closely related to climate. The first clear reading from Vostok is that even with a time resolution of 50 years, there is no clear indication of CO2 leading or following temperature variations. Sometime CO2 is a little ahead. Sometimes CO2 is a little behind. The temperature and CO2 levels stay fairly close to the same pattern overall.

So now the climate modelers have some more data to build into their modeling efforts. They need a simulation that reproduces this kind of CO2 and temperature relationship. The next generation of models will then be more accurate.

The one clear thing is that these variations are not driven by human activity. So there is more to CO2 levels than just human contributions. But natural CO2 levels would be expected to be around 270-280 ppmv, while current actual levels are around 380 ppmv. That 100 ppmv difference is due to human activity. The better models may indicate more accurately how it will interact with temperature.

Morning Coffee Notes
Treeless Newspaper: I noticed that the Christian Science Monitor offers a treeless version. They let you download the PDF form of the entire newspaper (preserving layout, pictures, advertising, etc.) at a price that is 50% of the subscription price. I wonder whether the news gathering and preparation cost is 50% versus 50% for paper, printing, and distribution. This concept might work for some kinds of newspapers and magazines.

Islam a religion of peace: This media and blog nonsense has exceeded my annoyance threshold. Bush used this phrase as an effective and memorable way to state his opposition to religious wars. It was never a serious theological statement. So why don't all these people who want religious wars just say so, instead of using this faux theology discussion.

Answering myself, it is because finding offensive snippets of Islamic thought is obviously insufficient to justify religious wars. It can masquerade as a theological discussion while actually advocating the return to religious wars. I happen to agree with Bush on this policy, but I disagree with many of his policies and it is understandable that people disagree with this one. They should have the courage and honesty to advocate religious warfare. (There are some bloggers who do openly advocate religious warfare. They are far less annoying than this faux theology.)

Laptop woes: Sadness on the corporate laptop front. While traveling I had the misfortune to slide on the bedspread in a hotel room while holding the laptop. Major static electricity jolts zapped from my hands into the base of the laptop (which was plugged into phone and grounded outlet at the time). It froze and took drastic action (remove battery and power) plus repeated reboots to recover. It looks like the CD/RW drive is damaged. It occasionally fails to boot because it does not recognize that device. I would have expected a sturdier electrostatic shock design for a laptop. This kind of static jolt has to be very common.

Ohio Valley Pollution Controls
In a recent reference the Junk Science site claims "Midwest Plants don't cause Northeast Smog". This struck me as odd because I once worked in that field and this is directly counter to the evidence available then.

Examination in detail reveals that the problem is that the referenced article extracted and modified a summary sentence from the executive summary of the OTAG report. These summaries tend to be highly politicized and written by the policy staff rather than the scientific staff. In this case, the summary has gone through three rounds of political reporting and summarization. The actual report says something different.

Background

What is normal? The normal ozone level of continental air is 20-30 ppb ozone. This is the contribution from plants, thunderstorms, etc.

What is safe? At high enough levels ozone is fatal. At lower levels you have burning eyes, lung damage, and crop damage. As the levels drop, the damage becomes insignificant. The EPA regulations have set a level of 120 ppb for 1 hour and 80 ppb for 8 hours as the target levels. This was reached by a political process balancing political power, the cost of controls, and the cost of damage.

Report Findings

Transported Ozone Ozone transport from the Midwest to the Northeast raises the baseline ozone level from 20 ppb to 50 ppb. The distances involved spread out the ozone generating pollutants, making this a fairly uniform affect with minor diurnal variations.

Short Term (1 hour) peaks The primary contribution to these is local pollutants. To reach 120ppb in the Northeast you find 20ppb natural plus 30 ppb from the Midwest plus over 70 ppb from local sources. Also, much of the observed local sources in the Northeast are area sources (cars, small business, residential) that can be time controlled to spread the impact and reduce the hourly peak.

So the report recommends concentrating on local controls to meet the 120 ppb limit. This is the part that was repeatedly summarized to reach the conclusion "Midwest Plants don't cause Northeast Smog."

Mid term (8 hour) peaks Here the mix of sources is more even. The 80 ppb level means 20 natural plus 30 from Midwest plus 30 local. The longer time period also means that local time based controls will not help. A mix of regional and local controls make sense. It is not reasonable for the Midwest to just dump its pollution on its neighbors. Neither is it reasonable for the Northeast to ask the Midwest to generate pristine air unless the Northeast accepts equally draconian restrictions and costs. The report does not make explicit recommendations regarding the proper sharing of this burden.

Analysis

Unfortunately, this debate has degenerated into a win/lose beggar thy neighbor fight. The Midwest wants the pollution controls removed. The Northeast wants them retained. Nobody is analyzing their cost effectiveness or overall impact.

This latest change eliminates some controls on upgrading existing point sources. This is a significant change because these sources contribute little to local pollution due to their tall smoke stacks. So they can now have large increases without triggering local regulatory limits. There is no analysis of whether such increases will significantly affect the Northeast. The regulatory change only affects these existing point sources. Some upgrades also reduce emissions, so it is not even estimated how much emissions will actually increase.

There is also no analysis of whether these old regulations were effective. Other similar regulations that required EPA selected control approaches have been shown to be less effective than industry selected controls and much more expensive. The EPA decision process selected approaches that were ten times more costly than necessary.

So now we have pure political power making these decisions. The notion of shared cost and shared benefit is discarded. The analysis needed to evaluate equitable sharing has not been done. The political decision makers are not interested in equity, cost effectiveness or public benefit. It has all degenerated into Midwest versus Northeast political power

Morning Coffee Notes
Afghanistan: A good story on rebuilding Afghanistan. In a sense, this is the newspaper equivalent of the strength of many blogs.

Satellites:A while ago I mentioned using GPS for atmospheric soundings. The GRACE satellite is transitioning into scientific operation. It's primary project is highly detailed gravity maps. It is also piggybacking another round of GPS sounding receivers. There were a few minor glitches, but all the scientific experiments appear to be working well.

True Porn Clerk Stories: Ali has another job so True Porn Clerk Stories has come to its end. Another bit of web literature reaches closure.

Morning Coffee Notes

VX Nerve gas: Nature reports that VX nerve gas appears to be rapidly neutralized by concrete. This could be very important for both urban warfare and urban terrorism responses. Of course VX is mostly an imaginary threat. Sarin is much easier to make and much more effective as a terror weapon. VX is hard to use and makes the press mostly because of its incredibly high toxicity.

Railroad Toilets: Also in Nature a recycling toilet for passenger rail. The much lower operating cost and most of the other features sound attractive. But reclaiming water for washing hands may be more than the public will trust of such a machine.

Chicago Restaurant Recommendation: The restaurant "Las Tablas" in North Chicago is a nice family restaurant. Zagats was right. The food is very good, the prices are low, the service is only fair, and the atmosphere very informal. Most of this trip was the usual business meals at business dinner locations. Any concierge can make suitable recommendations. (Although I will note that the breast of duck as Stefani's was excellent.) The style is Columbian/Argentinian barbecue. The Churrasco and Matrimonio were both excellent. Be prepared to sit on benches.

I tweaked the layout a bit. The Nature links above will expire at some point and become inaccessible. That's how Nature does it.

Military Strategy and Energy Planning
There are military reasons to spend money on energy efficiency and alternative energy sources. These cover a range of situations:

• In covert and special operations there is a need to support electronic devices. This kind of operation is often limited to things that can be carried in on someone's back, and that will operate in the field for weeks. Generators and diesel fuel are out of the question.
  
  In current operations there is large scale use of rechargeable batteries and solar panels. This leads to both significant research efforts to find better batteries and to find lighter and more robust PV panels. There is also research into various other potential energy sources like unconventional fuel cells. At the moment, special ops use PV panels.


• Forward outposts have a different interest. They may get supply shipments, but space is limited. So fuel substitutes for ammunition, food, or some other supply. This leads to resource tradeoffs that are similar to those found in very high priced energy areas. The limit is not dollar cost, it is limited weight permitted in shipping. So outposts will be a mix of alternative and conventional power sources.


• Nations may choose between spending on energy independence and military power to hold and defend energy sources. This is an area where it is difficult to assess the tradeoffs. Denmark has chosen to spend the amount that would have covered half the cost of operating one destroyer on subsidies that now have about 20% of their electricity supply from domestic wind sources.
  
  It is hard to assess whether this is a good use of money. They have gained some degree of independence, which gives more flexibility in foreign policy and military strategy. Half the cost of operating one ship is a modest expenditure when compared to the overall military costs. Denmark has also been very frugal, with careful monitoring to ensure that the subsidies are improving energy independence and not just providing pork barrel spending.
  
  The US spends huge sums on various stockpiles of oil and other raw materials for similar reasons.
  

It is easy to abuse the military justifications for energy independence spending. Other military spending is routinely abused as pork barrel funding and as political favors. The energy independence spending is even easier to abuse because the end product is much harder to measure.

A question from post Thanksgiving dinner discussion
Which will happen first, the US labeling gasoline pumps only in liters, or the replacement of the internal combustion engine?

Laptop and Long Distance Driving
A Triplite 140 inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter, a laptop running what used to be FreeAmp(I forget its new name), a Sony cassette adapter, and a whole bunch of CDs converted into Oggs. This is great for 4-6 hour drives. No more fussing with CDs. Decide on the playlist for the drive and away you go. With a 20GB drive and the 10:1 compression of Ogg it is easy to have 50 CDs on that laptop.

So I listened to the BBC audio dramatization of Lord of the Rings (13 hours), and various CDs. CDs could be selected to match the mental state to be expected at those times in the future. Late night keep awake music is best planned before the start, not during those late hours after a long drive.

Civil Defense
People wonder what they can do about CBW on a personal basis. There actually is something practical available in terms of protection against chemical warfare. Take training in hazardous release procedures.

Most of the chemical weapons are the same as or very similar to commonly used industrial chemicals. Accidental releases from factories and during transportation are common. As a result there are a variety of training courses and procedures for dealing with them.

In my more paranoid moments I wonder if the administration is not pushing this because a widespread education might change the attitudes around chemical weapons. They are very nasty stuff, but there is not a need for irrational terror. There is a lot that you can do in terms of symptom recognition and first aid. There are also cleanup techniques. And to a very large extent the local police and fire have had training on industrial chemical releases that is equally relevant for CW terrorism.

But then, I remember that these are politicians. Simple incompetence is far more common and equally likely as an explanation.

Back in the fifties they published extensive details on potential dangers of warfare and gave information on what to do. The expectation was that the government would handle big stuff and people would take care of their own little stuff. And experiences with natural disasters indicates that this is a reasonable expectation.

Perhaps the administration will realize that informing the public is a sensible thing to do. For now they remain lost in their secrecy obsession.

Weather and Leaves
Still mostly working and fighting a cold. But a quick run to get a new leaf sucker. The old rake broke a handfull of prongs, so it was time for a new one. Techno envy, laziness, and neat factor won. I got one of those multi-function blower, mulcher, vacuum things. They are on end of season discount so it wasn't very expensive. Then a few hours of blowing leaves around into piles and sucking them into the mulcher. The town gets a haul of shredded leaves tomorrow morning at the last fall leaf pickup.

There will still be a bunch more later, but this thing makes nicely shredded leaves. They should make decent compost. It's an entertaining toy.

Back for a little while, but still more travel is already planned and booked.

Railroad Notes
The continuing small improvements that eventually add to a large improvement reached one little milestone in Auburn, Washington recently. The FAST project finished its Auburn construction projects. FAST is a series of construction projects to improve the freight and non-commercial transportation in Washington state. They are a mix of grade separation work, where railroad and streets are separated by local re-routing and the construction of bridges, and similar highway work to raise bridges and re-route roads. In some cases simple highway changes can separate heavy truck traffic to and from freight yards and docks from the passenger car traffic. Even small steps to eliminate traffic jams do have a significant effect on the productivity of the freight shipping.

This particular project should make life much better around Auburn by eliminating several major railroad crossings. These are on a now busy freight line and near a freight yard. The passage of a freight train caused significant traffic jams. Similarly, during peak road traffic, the rail was effectively closed because safety and public pressure concerns halted rail traffic. Now these are bridges and the traffic interference is removed.

This project also partially enables the planned addition of commuter rail, enhanced signaling, and higher speed passenger rail. The rail restrictions needed for traffic safety would have caused problems for these.

Quick Notes
It's been a while. This fall and winter will be sporadic. The are lots of work travel requirements. I've still got 4 weeks traveling plus 2 weeks holiday for the month of November and December. Plus, there are all the accumulated things to do whenever I get home. The first snow of the season also took down some branches. This plus annual leaf/brush collection meant an afternoon of saws and shears. The local stores had sold out of bags, which meant a longer drive to get acceptable recycling yard bags. So there will be lots of gaps like this. In a few hours I'm on the road again.

This gap was made larger by the arrival of the laptop. So much of the play time has been spent getting things working on it and exploring its capabilities. It's a nice laptop. I prefer it over the corporate Dell C600.

Some people seem to have no problems blogging while traveling or involved in meetings. I find it difficult. Keeping up with work and email dominates my time, with a little to spare for web reading.

And one interesting (eventually important) bit of electronics news. There is a working silicon on glass processor. The article kind of sneers at the Z80, but I used to make all sorts of useful things out of Z80's. They are a marvelous, cheap little bit of intelligence, When they get this technology to the point of making ARM chips at 20 MHz it will be more impressive.

At first I wondered about why the 2-inch LCD. Then I realized that this will let them make a PDA, complete with processor, on the display.

Redwood Speculations
Idle dreaming. The fog water collection spurred thoughts about how the SF peninsula might be changed. What if there were a concerted effort to re-establish the redwoods, but in a land use layout that permitted co-existance with moderately high density use by people.

I've roamed the net, but I find nothing regarding how people and redwoods might co-exist. Can a mixed use environment be established that lets the redwoods strip the fog and nourish undergrowth? The eastern suburbs are filled with houses and trees that co-exist. The height of the redwoods and the nature of their water stripping action makes it plausible that clustered forest and building patterns would permit a decent density of people at the same time that there are a lot of trees around. That would be a really big improvement over the endless suburb.

All the current efforts seem organized around the goals of preserving the old growth forests and eliminating humanity. Nobody seems to be interested in establishing how man and redwood could co-exist. So the local politics are probably too polarized to deal with this now.

Maybe it will happen by accident. There are lots of young redwoods scattered around that are growing very fast. But the local street and building patterns make it difficult to see how tree pruning, wind damage, and related activities will be compatible with building and street locations. That takes more than just luck.

Morning Coffee Notes
I'm busy engaging in body clock shifting in prep for yet another short trip. (That means I got up way too early this morning because I need to get up even earlier tomorrow.) Coffee can only compensate for so much.

Put a new battery in the wristwatch. Ever notice how these things fail while traveling. This one failed in mid-meeting while I was giving a presentation. It's very confusing at first, since for a few hours it just ran slower and slower. It drifted off ten minutes during the presentation. So instead of running out of material early (like I thought had happened) I was right on time (as planned). By the end of the day it was off by another hour and visibly missing second ticks.

While waiting I noticed that Citizens watch company has an advertising push for their EcoDrive solar powered watches. It's a nice idea. But the environmental impact of the button batteries in regular watches is rather tiny. They have a fairly high recycling rate because these button batteries are dominantly used in cameras and jewelry. This makes it easy for the point of sale and point of repair to reclaim the old batteries. The Citizen watches are also pretty, but I can't imagine spending that much on a watch. The pricing is driven by jewelry and style considerations, not the extra cost of the solar. But the extra few dollars that they spent on solar did do its job. I looked at their watches.

Photovoltaic News
The Sacramento Metropolitan Utility District has discontinued their home PV program. The original (unrealistic) prediction that PV prices would plummet has not happened.

BP has recently won an award for their Powerview laminate. They are installing this as part of the roofing for hundreds of gasoline stations as a advertising and publicity effort. BP Solar is a major producer of various PV products. The price for this product is not given. It is merely characterized as "low".

This is another building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV), like those I mentioned earlier. None of these is cost appropriate for regular use. You need to have the publicity value, unusually high local electrical prices, or unusual access difficulties to justify them. But they are less expensive than the stand-alone modules. Both raw modules and BIPV components cost from $3.50-4.00 per peak W. The addition of structural components increases the raw module costs to $6/Wp. These prices have not changed significantly in the past year.

The major savings is that the structural components for BIPV are "free". They are the building components that would be needed regardless of whether solar is installed. Nonetheless, merely covering the interest payments from electrical savings requires that electricity cost at least 0.20 cents per KWh. (That assumes typical US cloudiness.) Some locations are this expensive, but in most locations subsidies are still required. With current BIPV production only a few hundred MWp per year, it is not that hard to remain at full capacity just to meet this limited demand.

The established markets (toys, remote power, small power) that are mobility and construction cost driven appear to be holding up. The push for new marketing is in the BIPV segment. Some is targeted at the high cost locations (e.g. small islands) while others are targeted at the publicity market. The extra customer traffic from properly introduced PV installations can be significant, so it is feasible to divert money from media advertising into PV installations.

Solar Greenhouse
There is another water from the sun scheme. The "seawater greenhouse" appears to work. This is an interesting concept, but the track record for similar efforts is depressingly poor. For example, there was all the enthusiasm for fog water collection. It appeared to have significant potential for a number of coastal regions in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. But after all this time, and all the money spent on studies, it is not being installed. That's one of the problems with these charity and NGO driven technologies. They are good at getting and spending grant money. They are not good at selecting or sponsoring viable businesses.

This looks like a really neat idea. Maybe something will come of it. Equally likely is that there are numerous flaws that are being ignored, but which will prevent a successful deployment. I spend enough time with NGOs to have noticed that they frequently select ideas that are good enough to maintain a healthy stream of grant money, but sufficiently flawed that they stay in the NGO/grant world rather than becoming viable businesses. A cynic might notice that if the idea was really any good they would not need grant money because they could get real money from investors.

Sometimes the more exotic good ideas need some grant money to build demonstrations that then lead to real investors. Hope springs eternal. Maybe this will be one.

Morning Coffee Notes
Roomba The roomba from irobot is the latest geek toy. This is a little robot vacuum cleaner. I saw one at Brookstones. The net will probably be buzzing about these for weeks. I hope that they actually work, since they look like a great toy. The concept is straightforward. A smart thing that roams around finding the walls and furniture, and then vacuums everything in between. The sensors are simple: an IR sensor and bumpers. They warn that the thing runs around bumping into stuff and that you should be careful about things that could be tipped over. It also can get stuck under overhanging objects, and it will try to consume low lying things like cords, papers, and clothes. For that price it can't be very smart.

Lurking in the details on roomba and related robots is an energy tidbit. With the vacuum motion, brushes, and vacuum all under synchronized control, they were able to figure out how to reduce the power consumption from about 1000W to 30W. Interesting.

Railroad traffic Intermodal traffic continues a very slow growth. It is low enough that it is hard to be sure whether the economy is improving, or this is just people shifting from truck to train to save money.

The produce traffic is clearly a result of shifting from truck to rail. Rail has 10% more produce traffic than last year. UP is rebuilding another 600 refrigerated cars from old style to new. This means removing everything except the frame and wheels. They get new floors, walls, roof, refrigerator, plus electronic temperature, fuel, and status sensors connected to satellite communications and location services. There is also an effort to attract shippers of other crops. Apparently cantelopes and similar melons are the next target. The reefers are sitting idle waiting for crops at about the time that these need shipping. Finally, they are trying to revive rail connections to more distribution centers. Some cities, like New York, still have rail connections to local distribution centers. Others need repairs, extensions, or relocation for rail service.

TDRS in place The TDRS satellite recovery operation is complete. The gentle nudges have placed it where it belongs.

(I just fixed the bad links below.)

New X-ray microscopes
These are not really all that new, but this is the kind of hidden technology improvement that leads to the improvements that the whole world sees. The folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have invented a new kind of electron X-ray microscope. The first electron microscope and each new kind of electron microscope have been the foundation for a great many industries. Few people outside the industry realize this, but the semiconductor industry is one of the worlds largest users of electron microscopes. You cannot manufacture disk drives or semiconductors without constant use of electron microscopes in the QA/QC operations. This new X-ray technology will probably become another foundation instrument used in electronics and many other industries.

Another fascinating X-ray technology is the diffraction X-ray systems. These can take some amazing pictures. One that caught my eye was an image of a biopsy slice. It showed the infiltration of cancerous tissue into healthy tissue. The cancerous cells jumped out as having a radically different texture. The diffraction X-ray is sensitive to molecular structure. This texture difference was reported to be due to molecular structural differences between the cancerous and healthy collagen. With conventional optical pictures it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between the healthy and cancerous tendrils. No chemical stain exists to see that difference either.

Diffraction X-ray technology has been around for many years, but it is held up by the difficulty imposed by the need for an X-ray synchrotron to generate the coherent X-rays. X-ray synchrotrons are large and expensive. For example of just how large, this is a picture of the one at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, IL.

If someone ever invents a convenient source of coherent X-rays there will be a big change in industry, medicine, and science.

Communist Nostalgia
Ah, a reminder of good old communist attitudes. With quotes like: How can you go wrong? This is from the Moscow Times, (it's in English). In Monday's edition there is a good old fashioned attack on the US for starting wars for the personal gain of the capitalists in charge. He had to update it a little bit from the old fashioned broadsides of the Communist era, but it is in that grand style. Of course now it has links and everything. (The links are often worth following, since he often finds more credible sources for some of his claims.)

My Muscovite friends still say that Moscow Times was a CIA front, and I must admit it has seemed very likely to me. I've never found proof beyond local rumor and editorial style. I think that they are getting nostalgic for a time where it was easier to identify the good guys, the bad guys, and the proper policies. Mr Floyd (the editorial writer) is an American, which is merely fitting. It's hard to find a good writer from Russia who is nostalgic about Communism. Mr Floyd has been filing entertaining abuse for several years.

Malaria Vaccine
Procrastination sometimes pays off. Nature has published a marvelous summary of what malaria is, a history of its understanding, and recent events. There is also a much more detailed [PDF] (free registration) description of vaccine efforts that in progress. So I will give up the effort to summarize this background and point to those papers. I don't usually like even free registrations, but that summary paper is excellent for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the antigens and current vaccine progress.

The super short summary is

• Natural immunity exists for malaria, but it is limited. It takes 5-10 years to acquire, and instead of preventing infection it significantly reduces the severity of the disease.
• A vaccine is likely to work, but likely to be similar to the influenza vaccines. Like influenza, malaria presents a constantly shifting challenge instead of a simple steady target like smallpox. So the immune system has problems.
• Any vaccine, even limited efficacy vaccine, is at least 10 years away. A more likely estimate is 15-20 years because to reach 10 years it would need to be one of the current vaccines, have no efficacy problems, and have no manufacturing issues. Almost every vaccine has some sort of issue to be resolved.

I got started on this by an MIT announcement in August regarding progress on an new vaccine. There are already a couple dozen vaccine candidate trials. Perhaps a dozen are rejects, some that just don't work and some that work but not sufficiently. The researchers at WEHI invented a vaccine for glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI). This is an oligosaccharide (complex sugar) that is released by malaria during red blood cell rupture. GPI toxicity is responsible for most of the severity of malaria fevers and tissue destruction. The early trials with mice indicated that malaria mortality (for a particular strain of each) dropped from 95% to 5% after vaccination.

Things that make this particular vaccine especially newsworthy are:

• It is the first GPI vaccine. There are 40+ currently identified antigens. GPI is the only antigen that is not part of the parasite.
• Since it does not target the parasite directly, there may be less evolution of resistance.
• It is the first oligosaccharide. All the other vaccines are peptide, DNA, or peptide plus DNA based. Oligosaccharide synthesis is a very new bio-tech capability.

I suppose I should point out there has been significant effort put into this over the past ten years, and that earlier partial genome results have already led to a better understanding of how malaria evades the immune system, and to some vaccine candidates. The recent completion of the genome sequencing for malaria and mosquito are an important milestone in a process that has been underway for a couple decades and that will take more decades to finish.

Vaccines are also not necessarily a good thing. In this article it is noted that some vaccines, like the GPI vaccine, may actually lead to the evolution of more severe strains of the disease. One possibility is that the disease could evolve to generate huge quantities of GPI. GPI Vaccinated people would not be affected and so would continue to spread the disease. It would become 100% fatal to those not vaccinated. That would be a very bad outcome.

Extension of this effort to create a GPI neutralizing drug, instead of a vaccine, would be highly beneficial. The drug could then be used as an immediate treatment for the more severe cases of malaria. So far there is no progress on creating such a drug.

Morning Notes
Hippocrates in Greek. I did find a copy of the Ancient Greek version and got it entered. There are serious font problems. I finally tweaked it to look right in Word and Powerpoint. It also happens to look right in Mozilla 1.0 on Win2k. It looks wrong on Linux and in IE on Win2k. It is really bad in Adobes PDF generator. That's inconvenient. I had hoped to be able to make PDFs including it. Maybe if I give Adobe $200 for an upgrade that would fix it. Given all the problems, I spare my readers the mangled Greek. I also question some of the original text that I copied. There is one word that looks like a misprint, and others that are very odd. Maybe these are Greek usages that I have never seen before.

The font problems are not fixable by just loading the right fonts. I have the right fonts. But many applications do not support all the font display requirements for Ancient Greek.

More Wind Finances The Wall Street Journal has another financial bit on wind power. A Spanish power utility is purchasing existing wind farms plus some farms that are under development from a Spanish wind power manufacturer. The manufacturer has decided to refocus on manufacturing, installation, and service of wind turbines. So it is selling its wind farms. The rest is just financial details and prospects.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page may be blinded by their political hatreds, but the financial reporters and editors consider this just another routine bit of business news.

Blogging, Accuracy, and Mobs. (This runs long, but it is just a morning coffee spurt.)

Doc Searls commented briefly on the warbloggers and points to two other cogent comments on the current state of war blogging. I think it is sad what has happened. Warbloggers used to take joy in exposing the lies and errors of propagandizing leftist media. Now they have become their enemy and are just another crowd of propagandists.

The electronic media and warblogger hysteria is also apparent in coverage of the Turkish uranium smuggling story. It seems that 15 pounds of weapons grade uranium ... oops, well a few hundred grams of ... oops, well there was this fraudulent con job where some Turks were trying to con a lot of money from the Iraqis. A vast hysteria was underway with warbloggers enthusiastic participants. Earlier bloggers would take pride in exposing error. Now they crow "Advantage Instapundit" because they blogged the false rumor first.

The med student hysteria is another interesting experience. It was classic mob hysteria with all the electronic media in full flight. After a few days it turns out that almost every reported fact was false. The TV and cable news were frothing at the mouth spouting error and rumor, with warbloggers enthusiastically echoing every scrap. The only truth: a restaurant customer reported overhearing a possible terrorist conversation by 3 Americans who looked Arabic. Everything else reported was either a lie, error, or unsubstantiated rumor. We will probably never know whether the conversation was a sick joke, a misunderstanding by the listener, or simple racism. It could be any of these. Med students can be stupid immature jokesters. People misunderstand fragments that they overhear. Racism can distort innocent conversations into terrible threats.

There were some feeble claims that this proves Americans are prejudiced racists, which is equally absurd. This mob hysteria proves that Americans are human. Demosthenes is still famous for his skill in manipulating "the mob". The mob, and mob hysteria, has been part of humanity in every culture in recorded history. Warbloggers are human too, and they joined in.

This hysteria is not occurring in a vacuum. The US government is engaged in a massive propaganda effort to create support for war. There have been Turkish con jobs targeting the Iraqis for the past 15 years. They were local or European news. Until recently, the governments discouraged reporting them because some were intelligence operations by CIA, Mossad, and KGB. This propaganda environment creates the climate for triggering hysteria.

Recommendations? First, the mob participants in the med student blogburst should practice a little introspection. You have now experience mob hysteria first hand. I'm not asking for public humiliation or apologies. But personal acceptance and understanding of your own humanity is better than hiding behind rationalizations and denial. You have experienced how easy it is to be sucked in to a mob. You know the emotions. So you can be more sensitive to these emotions the next time, and maybe avoid the next mob. It won't be easy. Everyone is highly vulnerable to mob hysteria.

Second, how about returning to fact checking, fact finding, and persuasion. It's not that hard to spot the rumor and the unlikely story. Emphasize "first with the truth" rather than "first with the story". In fields where you are expert, this is easy. It is one of the real strengths of the blog. Those with knowledge can speak to the world without intermediation. If you lack truth, why not wait a few days. The editorial essays need not change or wait. Just keep it easy for readers to separate opinion from fact.

Anyone familiar with US culture and human behavior reacted to the med student story with a "I wonder if this is true?". It all seemed so unlikely. This reaction was clear in the print reports. It was the TV and cable that instantly became hysterical. Print has a tradition of telling the truth, and being embarrassed by lies and errors. (True, its just a tradition and many papers want to break with tradition.) Ratings dominate the electronic media, with truth and accuracy of little importance. Bloggers know this. Bloggers have a choice.

I think the warbloggers should have waited a couple days. It was obvious that this story was filled with rumor and uncertainty. It was clear that a couple days wait would not change the world. Waiting for the facts would immensely boost the persuasiveness of warbloggers. It is in actions like this that I assess the intellectual basis for the rest of their arguments. I can use an assessment of how they handle situations where I have the facts to decide what to think about their views in situations where I do not have access to all the facts. Just as the NY Times hurts its cause through obvious errors, the warbloggers have hurt their cause.