Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The evolution of GOD

This once again tells me I am right in believing there is an evolutionary advantage to believing in GOD. No matter how odd it may seam. This also does nothing to indicate weather there is or isn't one, just that We HUMAN seem do better when we believe in something.

Personally I think GOD get's a bad rap for the misdeeds of religions.


A nightmare for Richard Dawkins: statistics show that atheists are a dying breed - Telegraph Blogs - Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk
"An interesting article in the Guardian today by philosopher Julian Baggini, which begins in cracking form: I have one, and only one, firm and sincere desire about what quality my grandchildren should possess: non-existence"

Not doing it for the kids - the Guardian Article mentioned above.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Are you F'n Kidding me!

Hello, My name is EVLYN ADIBERY adopted daughter of Late Mr. Tilaye Adibery of Ethiopia . Please I need your assistance to secure the sum of $ 6,300,000.00 (Six Million, Three Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) which he willed to me before his death as his adopted daughter.

What I need from you is to provide account where to transfer this fund and to invest it for me in your country while I further my education because the wife of Late Mr. Tilaye Adibery is not happy about the money I inherited from the family due to religion differences, therefore I need to transfer it out of here as fast as possible.

I will offer you 20% of the total money for providing account and assistance and 40% of any profit made out of the money when invested in your country. We will discuss more when I hear from you.

Regards EVLYN ADIBERY
I Will Send You My Pic When I Hear From You

I just got this today in my Email. Are you F'n Kidding me, there still sending these idiot letters out! Who falls for this shit?

Hello Evlyn,

    Please read http://www.419eater.com/  I think this might solve your problem.

John

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Cool web browser trick

This is A Cool Trick...


Go to any site with lot's of images, such as image search for something in google.


Then copy the block of text below in to the address bar and hit enter.  Make sure there are no spaces or it will not work.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++ }setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Monday, September 21, 2009

there's 300 times as much water as there is air

Ran across this on Slashdot by RobVB (1566105) It's just too interesting to let pass by.

The total mass of the oceans [hypertextbook.com] is about 1.4*10^21 kg. The total mass of the atmosphere [hypertextbook.com] is about 5*10^18 kg. That means the oceans weigh about 300 times as much as the atmosphere.

The heat capacity of water [npl.co.uk] is about 4000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1. The heat capacity of air [engineeringtoolbox.com] is about 1 kJ * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1, or about 1000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1.

So since there's 300 times as much water as there is air, and the heat capacity of water is 4 times larger, heating up the atmosphere by 1200 degree Celsius would take the same amount of energy as heating up the oceans by 1 degree Celsius. This may not prove or disprove your point, I just started thinking about numbers when you said "raising the temperature of a body of water by a few degrees".


Santa Barbara / Goleta Beach Wild Life.

Lately I have been taking very long walks some 6 hr or more along the Coal Oil Point Reserve, in Goleta, just north of Santa Barbara, Isla Vista (IV) and the UCSB campus. You can break off pieces of rock from the cliff face where you can see and smell the trapped crude oil.

Oil and tar is all over the sand and occurs naturally here. It a real problem when walking barefoot. In some spots oil is actually dripping off the rock faces and accumulates in patches of hardend sun baked tar. On hot days the whole area wreaks of hydrocarbons that have seeped up and are now evaporating off their lighter components, leaving behind tarry blobs.

Somehow even with all this, the area full a wide array of wildlife that has adapted. Small sharks, seals, sea lions, and more variety of wild birds then I can name. Every evening the humans gather along the sea cliffs and watch the sun set, and during the day surfers slosh back and forth in the fridged surf wearing black wet suits.


Sea Anemone on rocks at low tide 9/19/09







Beach Hoppers, live mostly on washed up sea weed, and the staple food of the endangered snowy plovers.

I went walking on the beach late one night armed with nothing but a VU Led flashlight hoping to finding some interesting florescent rocks. Talk about creeped out, I was 20 minutes down the beach from the stairs. On one side the sea cliff and the other the ocean, walking along in the dark the moon rose. The whole beach started squirming then I began feeling things banging and crawling up my legs and falling in to my shoes and getting squished.
It was a long walk to the stairs before I could make it off the beach. Nothing is worse then the unknown, I had no idea what they were if the bite or what. With the UV light they looked white and were wet and slimy and felt like slugs. Once home with proper light they are like land shrimp, some as long as an inch in length and could jump at good 20 inches in to the air.
See the video below.







WE LIVE IN PUBLIC

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Jesse Monroy wrote:
I guess I should have asked, Do we know Josh Harris?
Supposedly was head of Internet video company in 1994? Juniper?

BTW, movie opens in LA this weekend.

Jesse


On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 1:41 AM, John Sokol <john.sokol@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/
>
> Looks really stupid.
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Jesse Monroy <jesse650@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Josh Harris
>>
>> http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/09/18/04
>
>


This guy is a nobody!

Livecam was the very first anything streaming video on the internet. And real audio had the first streaming audio. White Pine had the first web chat. All around 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo.com  mid 1993, 

 I was in NYC with Lucy at the time and helped a few teeny ISP get started like Escape.com  while working for Fujistu on getting them up to speed on the internet.
Most ISP's then were little more then a T1 and some web servers and modems in some guys bed room.


The Pseudo channel on Prodigy   (fuck no wonder no one ever hear of him, only lame idiots used prodigy) That is not the internet!

Bankruptcy and closed operations in September 2000.[2] In 2001, its remaining assets were purchased by INTV

---------------------------

On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society as seen through the eyes of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of", visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner ("DIG!"), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Josh Harris, often called the "Warhol of the Web" through the infamous dot.com boom of the 1990's, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network and created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the millennium. He proved how in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.
---------------------

We Live in Public is the story of the Internets revolutionary impact on human interaction as told through the eyes of Internet pioneer and visionary, Josh Harris. Though once considered the godfather of the downtown Internet scene in NYC in the 90s, known far and wide for his outrageous parties, innovations in chat, streaming audio and the creation of the first online television network, Harris is but a footnote in history at this point all because he took his experiments with the Internet and media consumption too far. Award-winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, has been documenting his incredible experiments, and his ups and downs, for over a decade from puppeteer to puppet, from millionaire to exiled and broke. Timoner sets out with We Live in Public to tell the story of yet another walking cautionary tale in Josh Harris who, as Anton Newcombe did for artists everywhere in DIG!, will inevitably shake us all to the core about what the future brings for all of us as we increasingly live, work and love through media and technology.

The film charts the rise and fall of the man who, as far back as the early 1990s, predicted a future dominated by life online, where people will be actively willing to reveal all aspects of their private lives as significance and fame become more accessible, only to find themselves trapped in virtual boxes. Josh Harris foresaw online social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, and created the companies that serve as the direct predecessors to these fabulously successful ventures. But as Josh says, "The first guy gets the arrow, the second guy gets the castle.

Founder of the first Internet market research company (Jupiter Communications), and the first Internet-based television network (Pseudo.com), Josh Harris told his brother, I have to do this, or someone else will do it first. It didnt matter that less than 1% of the population had broadband when he unveiled Pseudo, so very few people could watch his 10 channels online. It mattered to him that he did it, and showed anyone who was watching, the future. Called by many the Warhol of the Web, Josh has spent his life coming to terms with his vision of the future and how media and technology affects social interaction and the development of personal identity.

How Harris became a media casualty provides the emotional core of our story. The youngest child of seven, and neglected by his parents, Harris was a lonely child, nurtured, as he says, on the electronic calories of television. He claims to have been raised by the tube and found his spiritual family in Gilligans Island. After several successful business ventures in the first dotcom boom, Harris set out to make up for his lonesome childhood by surrounding himself with people and cameras, creating his own island.

Theories that first made Harris a wealthy and successful Internet pioneer during the dotcom boom of the mid-90s are the same ideas that eventually drove him towards a mental collapse. Harris continued to place himself and the people around him in the middle of a not-so-distant future where he believed we will all want to live in public, using the media and technology to publicize our lives and create our virtual selves. He created an underground bunker in the heart of NYC at the turn of the Millennium and had over 100 people move into his living human Petri dish an artificial society where they lived in pods, each with their own surveillance camera and channel in a closed circuit network, and subjected themselves to artillery training and interrogations in order to be on camera. It was busted by FEMA as a Millennial Cult on January 1st 2000, where upon, Harris decided to take the experiment a step farther

This time, he was the guinea pig. He had his loft rigged with 32 motion-controlled surveillance cameras from the toilet to the bedroom, and announced weliveinpublic.com A live, 24/7 look into the lives of Harris and his girlfriend, Tanya. They set out to broadcast every aspect of their lives for six months, and even hopefully to conceive in public! The experiment backfired as the chatters began to control the Harris life, resulting in the deterioration of his personal relationship as well as his mental state. After having lived under complete surveillance while losing the majority of his money in the dotcom crash as well as his mind, Harris fled into seclusion on an apple farm in upstate New York for the next five years. He cut himself off from all the media and fame he had been obsessed with, to shed the electronic calories hed been consuming through that media his whole life - and find himself.

During his exile, Harris visionary predictions about technology and online social networking were manifesting in companies like Friendster, and then MySpace and Facebook, among others.

Harris returned to the tech world with his newest creation "Operator 11, an online streaming video hub where users could create and broadcast their own content never found an audience. This time he was too late. YouTube had already cornered the market with its slogan broadcast yourself.

Having sunk the remainder of his money into Operator 11, Josh Harris was now broke. With no money and the burning desire to finally prove himself as the greatest artist of the 21st century, Harris vanished to Ethiopia while the world he so succinctly predicted blows up around him.

Sundance Award-Winning director Ondi Timoner and Interloper Films have been chronicling Harriss story since his peak in 1999. As with Timoners previous films DIG! and JOIN US, We Live In Public takes us deep underground into a world we would never otherwise have access to. Told through visually-stimulating vérité footage woven into a dramatic narrative, the film then takes the power of documentary cinema one step further thanks to Harriss obsession with constantly documenting himself and the world around him. We are currently crafting an exciting hour and a half adventure out of the 3-4000 hours of footage accumulated for the project over the last ten years. The result will without doubt be a visceral ride through our recent history, back to a time not so long ago when life was markedly different for most all of us, before the decade between web 1.0 and web 2.0, before the greatest invention of our lifetime had taken hold of our lives, and according to Harris - were only seeing the smoke on the horizon.




Sunday, September 20, 2009

Saturday, September 19, 2009

green ideas - I am starting "thegreentank" blog

green ideas for power, products and designs

There have been so many good discussions flying over E_mail these past few weeks, I think it's about time to share a few of them.

You can read it at  thegreentank.blogspot.com

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Windmill Efficiency.

I have been searching for articles on making efficient wind mills.

This seems like a really obvious thing, but apparently no one is doing this right!

Some articles below show this.

http://nov55.com/wdm.html
http://www.energyadvocate.com/fw91.htm
http://www.appropedia.org/Savonius_rotor


This seems like a perfect problem to put to a genetic algorithm search.
If I could find a good simulation code, then many different designs not just of blade shape but orientations, configuration. Both horizontal and vertical can be simulated and tested quickly.

I am definably seeing a trend where very old wind mill designs are cheaper easier and more efficient then these modern high tech mega windmills.

Where modern windmills seem skewed towards large construction projects.

It would seem something is broken in the wind industry.


Some additional interesting articles:

A few more ideas.
  • You know about shark skin has dimples that reduce drag, Using these in water pipes, ship hulls and propellers should make these more efficient.


    Its dermal denticles decrease drag and turbulence by directing water flow over the body, which allows surrounding water to pass over the shark more effectively. SPEEDO Introduces Fastskin -- the Fastest Swimsuit Ever Made

    Would this work with Air? For Windmill blades, and aircraft propellers and wings?


  • Energy storage is a big deal. Can we store compress air underground generated from a windmill or solar (sterling cycle) and then have generators that convert this compressed air in to power on demand?