My tech blog posts are partly for my own use, and partly I'm trying to give back.
Sometimes it seems to work; some posts get very kind comments.
There's one, however, that really stands out.
An otherwise unremarkable May 2008 post on how badly written OS X print drivers cause howling, roaring, fans has earned me more “thank yous” than almost anything else I’ve done in the past few years.
Funny how that works.
So you’ve probably been thinking that after the last ten years we’re due for a respite. A bit of calm amidst the floating refuse of our crated life raft. It was a big waterfall for sure, but now we get to float for a while.
Then you hear the roar of the next cataract.
Very few people now remember than by 1986 Japan had just about finished off the American car industry and was about to conquer the American computing industry.
What'? You don’t remember the congressman taking a sledgehammer to a Japanese made IBM-clone?
I remember because my very first PC was an 8086 clone made by Panasonic. It was the most over-engineered device I’ve ever owned. It was built to last thirty years, and it cost less than the other clones on the market.
IBM, Compaq, and the like were terrified. Congress was appalled – America had lost the automobile*, now we were going to lose the computer too.
De facto “voluntary” quotas were enforced. Panasonic and other Japanese PC vendors left the desktop market. Dell became dominant.
Flash forward 23 years …
…Chinese car maker BYD Co. BYD developed an electric automobile that only costs consumers $22,000…
Gee, this feels familiar.
Wait until Chinese/Google “Chromestellation” netbooks start selling at Walmart for $124.99 (batteries not included).
Eeeeeeeyyyyyaaaaaaa …..
* The same set of “voluntary” quotas forced Japan to manufacture in the US, and also allowed GM, Chrysler and Ford time to more or less compete with Japan.
I am a lowly travel worm, unworthy to learn the techniques of the travel Ninja (emphases mine) …
… Preventing the person in front of you from reclining their seat (Spilling soda on their head is minus 5 points. Pointing the air vent so that it blows on their head is plus 5 points.)…
… Stopping the person next to you from reading over your shoulder. (Saying “Read my stuff again and I’ll kill you” is minus 5 points. Turning the book/newspaper upside down and continue reading earns the contestant 5 points.)…
Captured via Jacob Reider’s Google Reader shared item list.
I don’t know the back story here, but clearly Google is sensitive to accusations of environmentally incorrectness. Their response is fascinating …
Official Google Blog: Powering a Google search
… Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.
In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.
I think it would be interesting to compare Google search CO2 prediction to CO2 production from a 1 km walk.
Resource-Based Relative Value Scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaTo implement the RBRVS rules an accounting system had to be developed. That accounting system is expressed as the rules for "Evaluation and Management" codes.
... RBRVS was created at Harvard University in their national RBRVS study from December 1985 and published on September 29, 1988. William Hsiao was the principal investigator who organized a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, which included statisticians, physicians, economists and measurement specialists, to develop the RBRVS.
In 1988 the results were submitted to the Health Care Financing Administration (today CMS) to be used in the American Medicare system. In December of the following year, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989, switching Medicare to an RBRVS payment schedule. This took effect in January 1, 1992. Starting in 1991, the AMA has updated RBRVS continually. As of May 2003, over 3500 corrections have been submitted to CMS.
Physicians bill their services using procedure codes developed by a seventeen member committee known as the CPT Editorial Panel...
FactCheck.org: Is it true that 36 percent to 37 percent of eligible voters failed to vote in the recent presidential election?The GOP voters stayed home, the Democrats came out, and we had a historic win with a small increase in overall turnout which was, still, high by historic standards.
... Minnesota ... had the highest voter turnout, at 77.8 percent. Hawaii and West Virginia are tied for the lowest turnout, with 50.6 percent each...
... Before Americans went to the polls on November 4, much was made in media reports about record levels of voter registration and high enthusiasm levels among the electorate. And while the 61.6 percent turnout number doesn't seem that impressive – in 2004, after all, 60.1 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot for the highest office – it is the highest turnout in the U.S. in decades. As the CSAE report says, "If the rate of voting exceeds 61.0 percent of eligibles, turnout will have been the highest since 1964."
But why was it not even higher? Republican turnout, according to CSAE, dropped, while Democrats voted in higher numbers. The percentage of those voting for the Republican presidential ticket dropped by 1.3 percentage points and those voting for the Democratic ticket went up by 2.6 percentage points from 2004. Curtis Gans, the center's director, said he, too, thought even more Americans would vote in 2008. "... we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats...
There’s a bit of wing-nuttery on the net about a possible relationship between the widespread use of obstetric ultrasound and an increase in the percentage of children diagnoses with autism (though there’s also been a simultaneous decrease in the percent of children diagnosed with mental retardation).
Sometimes the discussions have even had humorous consequences.
Still, there’s some reason for interest.
Which brings us the use of intermediate intensity ultrasound for altering the brain …
Sound and no fury | The Economist
… William Tyler and his colleagues at Arizona State University..
… knew from experiments done by other groups of researchers that ultrasound can have a physical effect on tissue. Unfortunately, that effect is generally a harmful one. When nerve cells were exposed to it at close range, for example, they heated up and died. Dr Tyler, however, realised that all of the studies he had examined used high-intensity ultrasound. He guessed that lowering the intensity might allow nerve cells to be manipulated without damage.
To test this idea, he and his colleagues placed slices of living mouse brain into an artificial version of cerebrospinal fluid, the liquid that cushions the brain. They then beamed different frequencies of low-intensity ultrasound at the slices and monitored the results using dye molecules that give off light in response to the activity of proteins called ion channels. (An ion channel is a molecule that allows the passage of electrically charged atoms of sodium, potassium, calcium and so on through the outer membrane of a cell.)
The purpose of all this was to coax the cells to release neurotransmitters. These are molecules that carry information from one nerve cell to another. When they arrive, they cause ion channels to open and thus trigger the electrical impulses that pass messages along nerve fibres. When those pulses arrive at the other end of a fibre they, in turn, trigger the release of more neurotransmitters.
Disruption of this system of communication is characteristic of several medical conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression and epilepsy. Ways of boosting the release of neurotransmitters may thus have therapeutic value. And the ultrasound did indeed boost their release.
How that came about is not absolutely certain, but Dr Tyler thinks the shaking that his ultrasound gave to the cells in question opened up some of their ion channels. The cells were thus fooled into acting as though an impulse had arrived, and released neurotransmitters as a consequence…
So the obvious question is how does the intensity and duration of the ultrasound used in these experiments compare with the intensity of ultrasound used in obstetric scans? After all, “disruption of this system of communication” is also a characteristic of autism.
It feels like it would be wise to do further animal model studies, and to discourage obstetric ultrasound done largely for entertainment purposes rather than to truly guide and manage pregnancy.
Gmail - Circuits: A Strange Macworld ExpoSo we have by month
.. the holiday season (Novemberish), the educational buying season (late summer), the iPod product cycle (October), the iLife development cycle (usually March), the iPhone cycle (June)..
If the New York Times dies, does the news die? VentureBeat
The death of an institution isn’t far off, writes the Atlantic in an article titled End Times, and with it an entire industry may be preparing to slip underwater. Low on cash, high in debt, the legendary New York Times is reeling from the recession. There’s no guarantee that it, or many others of our best newspapers, will survive the next year.
The immediate effect of the Times ending its storied run (or degrading to a lesser entity) will no doubt be the journalistic equivalent of a nuclear explosion...
... The New York Times has done an excellent job of growing its web property. ComScore says the company’s pageviews are approaching 200 million a month; that’s a lot for any website...
... Getting a New York Times-caliber feature article requires paying a Times-caliber writer for a week or more of research and writing. That will set you back between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on who is doing the work. That figure doesn’t include the editing and expenses, by the way.
For most sites, that means they need 100,000 to a million pageviews to break even, for a single article...If the NYT does die, I think it will take decades to replace it. I keep returning to the death of BYTE in the 1990s -- we still don't have anything like it on the web.
(this has a bad link, should be fixed soon. Go to the site to find it.)
