100 Million Americans: Where Are They?
Based on the latest census data, looks like the Mountain West and the South Atlantic states are the biggest percentage gainers.
« September 2006 | | November 2006 »
October 23, 2006
October 22, 2006
No carrier
I have a Palm Tungsten E2 that I am trying to use to browse the Web through a Motorola SLVR (E7) via a bluetooth connection. I have not gotten it to work so far, the tungsten connects to the phone, but the phone gives an error when it tries to get a connection. The tungsten gets a "no carrier" error from the phone. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.
October 19, 2006
Standby Power
This past summer when we were having the heat wave and power failures in Queens, I started to do some calculations on how much power all of the cable boxes in New York City might be consuming even when they were supposedly switched off, because they never really turn off. For my birthday last year I got this device that measures how much power something uses (Kill-A-Watt), and it showed that my Scientific Atlanta built Time Warner leased cable box uses nearly as much power switched off as it does when it is switched on (17W) (so what is the on/off button for? I guess because it is supposed to have one?)
So I came across this interesting article on standby power in electronic devices. Good to see that other people are thinking about this, and what a large problem in really is. Also interesting to note from the article that our current president Bush actually did something useful for the environment in 2001 by dictating that the federal government should purchase low standby power devices.
October 18, 2006
Schneier on the Death of the Casual Conversation
Everyday conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it... Privacy was the default assumption. This has changed. We now type our casual conversations. We chat in e-mail, with instant messages on our computer and SMS messages on our cellphones, and in comments on social networking Web sites like Friendster, LiveJournal and... MySpace. These conversations... are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting that we’re being recorded... If you find this disturbing, you should. Fewer conversations are ephemeral, and we’re losing control over the data. We trust our ISPs, employers and cellphone companies with our privacy, but again and again they’ve proven they can’t be trusted.
October 10, 2006
Legally Married
My good friends made the September "couple of the month" on some ridiculous legal blog. Congratulations to them on their wedding, it was a great time.
A Lasting Chill?
(I always forget to publish these scheduled articles...)
Although the article appears on the front page of the business section (An Obsession with Leaks and Plugs, PDF), it really ought to be a general op-ed. The current climate of secrecy, fear, and paranoia engendered by the administration already seem to be having ill effects on journalism, and as one could possibly even argued by the recent goings on at Hewlett-Packard, big business. The aptly titled "sunshine laws" that have been enacted in many places across the country passed because of the general feeling that democracy works best out in the open, in the brightly visible light of day. Exactly what about that is unclear to the current administration?
October 09, 2006
Bad Legacy
I am going to lean on the New York Times a bit here (completely out of character, I know). Thomas Friedman started off an op-ed last week with some funny (you might say morbidly funny) comments on how you could start to fill a bookshelf with the burgeoning section of "how the Bush administration has screwed up" titles. Things seem to be -- hopefully -- pointing in the way of Democratic victory in at least one of the branches of Congress, which if it happens, might start to rein in some of the Republican groupthink that has been going on in Washington for the past six years. Today David Sanger comments on how the decision to focus on Iraq has shown yet again to be a mistake, as North Korea claims to have tested a nuclear bomb and there isn't much of anything we can do about it. Three years ago we threw our lot in with the merely bad, and really haven't paid enough attention to the definitely worse.
I guess you could claim a lot of this is the 20/20 of hindsight, but I would definitely argue that there were some bad decisions based on some bad policies and the ideological (instead of realistic) visions of how certain things would play out.
October 08, 2006
Regulating Our Little Slice of Heaven?
Very interesting article in the New York Times on the "special" treatment of religion in government laws and regulations. Just how far should we go to accommodate any minority at the expense (literally and figuratively, as the article says -- regulation or the lack of it often comes at a cost) of the general public?
Like most Boulder County residents, several church members said they cherish the open space preserved by the county’s past land-use decisions. But they think the county was wrong to reject the church’s proposal.
Lanny Pinchuk, a church member who formerly served on the county planning board, praised all that the county has done to preserve the environment. “But you can’t keep people from coming to the religious institution of their choice,” he said. “I feel that is just, well, un-American.”
Church leaders and members said their current proposal was the “forever plan,” the last expansion the church would make on this site.
But they all struggled to explain why it is an unconstitutional burden for them to have to turn away newcomers now when, if they continue to grow, they will inevitably have to turn away people when their “forever” building is full.
“At some point, we’re going to have to say we can’t accommodate any more; I mean, we’re not going to have a 100-story building over there,” said Gerry Witt, a founding church member who has recently put his house on the market so he and his wife, Carole, can move to a less developed area on the western slope of the Rockies.
“So is there any limit?” He thought a moment, then answered his question. “Yes,” he said. “There’s God’s limit. When he says, ‘You’re at your limit,’ that’s when we will stop.”
October 05, 2006
Not what they said before, but we'll take it
Maybe I missed something over the past six years, but hasn't the administration done all it can to disprove or otherwise ignore global warming? Or is "climate change" not the same thing? Well, at least the Department of Energy seems to have come around.
DOE Releases Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan
DOE released on September 20th the Climate Change Technology Program (CCTP) Strategic Plan, which details measures to accelerate the development and reduce the cost of new and advanced technologies that avoid, reduce, or capture and store greenhouse gas emissions. CCTP is the technology component of a comprehensive U.S. strategy introduced by President Bush in 2002 to combat climate change. That strategy includes measures to advance climate change science; spur clean energy technology development and deployment; promote international collaboration; and slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions through voluntary, incentive-based, and mandatory partnerships.
The CCTP Strategic Plan organizes roughly $3 billion in federal spending for climate technology research, development, demonstration, and deployment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase economic growth. The plan sets six complementary goals: (1) reducing emissions from energy use and infrastructure; (2) reducing emissions from energy supply; (3) capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide; (4) reducing emissions of other greenhouse gases; (5) measuring and monitoring emissions; and (6) bolstering the contributions of basic science to climate change. It examines energy efficiency, hydrogen, renewable energy, and renewable fuels among an array of other low-emissions energy technologies.
The strategic plan also notes the difficulty of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions; examining a range of scenarios, the report notes that cumulative global emissions over the next century would have to be reduced by the equivalent of 300 billion to a trillion metric tons of carbon. Deploying a million megawatts of wind power would cut emissions by only about 1 billion metric tons of carbon per year. On the other hand, advanced energy efficiency technologies could cut global carbon emissions by 270 billion tons over the next century. See the DOE press release and the CCTP Strategic Plan.