In My Honest Opinion -- (I, MHo)

Oooh. Shiny. Nationwide 4G from LightSquared

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:00:45 -0400

This sounds awesome: a nationwide 4G-LTE wireless network that is scheduled to be up and running (covering 92% of the US population) by 2015. There are some minor details — such as AT&T and Verizon are not allow to play on this network! But that FCC clause denying AT&T and Verizon access is aimed at increasing wireless broadband competition. (Will it save Sprint’s business? Create a Google Wireless plan for Android phones? Turn Apple into its own ISP?) I’m thinking this could be a game-changer — or it could fizzle out like “femtocells”…. All depends on how it’s implemented and how much it’ll cost.

This consortium came into existence following the Harbinger Capital Partners investment group’s acquisition of SkyTerra Communications (now LightSquared). SkyTerra will provide the spectrum for this venture. Nokia Siemens will design the network, install equipment, and manage the operation, which consists of about 40,000 cellular base stations.

And the whole shebang will cover over 92 percent of the US population by 2015, the new company pledges.

Does Cellulose Really Exist In Space?

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:59:42 -0400

I’ve always wondered why the detection of cellulose in space hasn’t been studied more. If cellulose actually exists elsewhere in the universe, I’d think that would be pretty good supporting evidence of ET life out there…

This was reported in Nature, in 1978. Tholins have been detected as well (I think by Carl Sagan). There are many unidentified bands in the spectra of stars. Wide bands are produced by some complex molecules in the interstellar space.

Robot Teachers

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:01:42 -0400

The NYTimes has a short video on robotic teachers that all look humanoid… but I’d think that the software to improve human learning is more important than having robots that don’t quite bridge the “uncanny valley.”

infographics are cool

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:00:46 -0400

infographics are cool

Despicable Me

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:23:18 -0400

I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I was somewhat surprised to discover that it was produced by a company I’d never heard of: Illumination Entertainment. IBM apparently had a hand in rendering the animation, saying:

For “Despicable Me” the animation process generated 142 terabytes of data — an amount roughly equivalent to the traffic generated by over 118 million active MySpace users or 250,000 streams of 25 million songs.

I’m not sure why MySpace traffic is a benchmark for data usage, but I find it fascinating that the movie involved 330 animators/producers/staff and used 6,500 processor cores in a dedicated server farm… taking “12 months of intensive graphics and 3-D animation rendering, amounting to up to 500,000 frames per week.” So that’s 26 million frames for a 95-minute long movie… I gotta look up how many animators it used to take to do those old animated Disney movies by hand (and how many frames they made).

Infograph: GDP per capita over 500yrs

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:44:00 -0400

Here’s an awesome graph of the growth of GDP over the last 500 yrs for East Asia and the US…

Portable Eye Doc

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:52:38 -0400

Isotope Ratios Will Give You Away

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:01:42 -0400

Apparently, you are what you drink. And if you drink bottled water (or bottled drinks in general), the isotope ratios in your favorite beverages can be traced back to where the water came from. So if you drink a lot of Dasani water bottled in Colorado, the isotope signature from that water can end up in your hair… and it’s possible that your drinking habits can be discovered from your hair’s isotope signature. The solution: constantly rotate your beverages and buy bottled water from all over the world….

Solar-Powered Plane... To Orbit The Globe?

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:17:29 -0400

A solar-powered plane just spent 26hrs in the air, proving that it’s possible for it to fly continuously, day or night. While the group behind it is planning to circle the globe in this solar plane, I think it would be more interesting to see this vehicle as an autonomous solar-powered plane — so that it could be an alternative to launching LEO satellites. If autonomous solar powered planes could “orbit” the Earth, then it would be a lot easier/cheaper to create a global wireless communication network (without the lag time that satellites have). Maybe there would be some real competition with wireless carriers… However, I’m probably vastly discounting the difficulty of making this plane autonomous.

A Persistent Gender Gap For Math/Verbal Skills

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:50:00 -0400

This is an interesting study: Gender Gap Persists At Highest Levels Of Standardized Testing. Over a 30 year time period, the test scores of boys and girls show that in the top 5% of the bell curve, boys do better than girls at math/science tests at about a 4:1 ratio. During the same period, top performing girls only do slightly better than the boys in verbal reasoning and writing ability tests.

Citation: Wai, J., et al., “Sex differences in the right tail of cognitive abilities: A 30 year examination.” Intelligence (2010). doi: 10.1016/j.intell.2010.04.006

I wonder if this is related to autism being more common in boys than in girls.

“Autism is about four times more common in boys than girls.”
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml

The Elusive Giant Magnetocaloric Effect

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:00:43 -0400

Refrigerators are pretty energy-inefficient. So discovering materials that can produce a giant magetocaloric effect could help save a lot of energy someday. But I’m not sure which effect has more promise the thermoelectric effect or the giant magnetocaloric effect. The giant magnetocaloric effect definitely wins on having a cool name, though.

iProducts: Great since day one

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:14:06 -0400

iProducts: Great since day one:

The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.

Apple has a culture of doing things in “insanely great” ways. Sure, people can argue that they don’t always achieve “greatness” — but the attempt to do so generally produces products of higher caliber than nearly all other consumer electronics/software. Consumers can tell the difference, and until Apple bets big on a total flop, Apple’s business will likely continue to grow nicely for quite some time. Even if Google’s Android marketshare overtakes the iPhone….

Immortality Is Not Just For Vampires Anymore

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:08:00 -0400

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish might be the key to learning about why animals age. Individual jellyfish can grow up from a polyp into an adult jelly — and then revert back to a polyp. Obviously, whatever genetic trick these jellyfish have… could be a trick that only jellyfish or other very simple organisms are able to perform. But it’s still a neat trick.

Good Ol' Ben Franklin...

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:11:40 -0400

“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by an invention of ours.” — Ben Franklin

Is Archive.org Able To Keep Up?

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:08:44 -0400

Occassionally, I check out Archive.org to see what websites looked like a few years ago… But recently, it seems like the Archive isn’t really archiving new material. They say they’re “just a bit behind” in indexing — and that the data that has been donated to them via Alexa has a stipulation that only data older than 6 months can be displayed in the Archive.

But with Twitter/Youtube/Facebook and all sorts of “real-time” internet data being created at an incredible pace… is it even possible for Archive.org to keep up with its archive? The US Library of Congress is already archiving all public Tweets, but it seems like the efforts to archive the internet zeitgeist is becoming a nearly impossible task.

Beg, Borrow Or Crowdfund -- It Pays To Be Persistent

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 06:08:23 -0400

I came across an interesting writeup of a successful Kickstarter project where the project creator admits to having a back-up plan:

At the time, I also thought that if we didn’t reach our Kickstarter goal by the deadline, then I would move to the Indiegogo platform and ask all our original backers to re-pledge their amounts so we could collect immediately (that’s one major difference between Kickstarter and Indiegogo). I realized we probably would lose close to 25% of the backers this way (due to various factors) — but it was better than nothing.

This strategy makes me wonder how many competitors can exist in the “crowdfunding platform” market. EBay dominates the “online auction” market despite several attempts from others to compete with eBay…. so is there a similar winner-takes-all market for crowdfunding platforms? If project creators daisy-chain their crowdfunding projects, why don’t the do it in parallel? Hmm.

In any case, crowdfunding projects aren’t “set it and forget it” efforts. It takes a lot of legwork, passion and fan engagement to pull it off.

The Japanese Space Agency Has The Right Idea

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 05:43:26 -0400

Japan is aiming for a moon base to be constructed by robots before 2020. This is a seriously good idea that NASA should have been working on for decades now, instead of shuttling people up to the ISS. I guess the ISS is cool and all, but a permanent moon base built and maintained by robots? How can you beat that? Even if the Japanese don’t get their moon base built on time — at least they’ve invested in developing robot technology that could be incredibly useful to their aging population on Earth. Robot technologies have dividends for the Earth-based economy, something that the ISS and the proposals to go Mars or an asteroid don’t.

via amitkumar01: Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S....

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:49:33 -0400

via amitkumar01:

Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture?

Cold Fusion's Got Some 'Splainin' To Do....

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:00:00 -0400

Cold Fusion was easily dismissed as “non-science” by anyone who read the original papers from Pons & Fleischman… I took a class in college that went over the journal submissions, demonstrating “what not to do” in science. Mocking other chemists is a widespread hobby among the chemical sciences.

However, Cold Fusion is making a comeback now. But it’s more focused on nailing down how “excess heat” can be observed from various calorimetry experiments. There also seem to be some researchers looking into “low energy” nuclear chemistry, but I’m skeptical about what they’re really looking at… I think they’re mostly trying to get funding for doing research that has a world-changing impact but a vanishingly low probability of working… It’s like “placebo” science — it might make someone feel better, but the effects are all in someone’s interpretation.

Robonauts 2.0 (aka R2)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:08:59 -0500

NASA and GM are working on robonauts..? Looks sorta like Honda’s bipedal robots, but these Robonauts seem to be focused on “waist-up” functions instead of walking.