Awakenings, Part MMMCMLXIV.3

Today I slept in until 10:30, despite having "set" my alarm for 7:00 am. It turns out that when I reset my alarm after the power failure last friday, I got the AM and PM confused so my 7:00 am turned out to be 7:00 pm. I had wanted to get up early in case the scrap dealer needed help when he came to remove the remains of an old solid-steel architect's drafting table that has been mouldering in my basement since shortly after I moved in. As it was, he showed up this morning with two helpers and so taxlady had no need to wake me.

So, one more little part of the basement has been cleaned out. I'm starting to feel good about that. Eventually we may even have enough room to move down there! The next thing that needs to go is the spare stove. Does anyone know anyone or anywhere that I could get rid of a perfectly working old stove? Venues that pay money are preferred!

Oh, and speaking of Money, I got a pair of Birthday cards from the Folks today. Each enclosed some money. Dad's said it was for 'your favorite Num Nums', and I told taxlady that was her, so she wanted to take the money. Instead, I think it'll go towards an all-dressed pizza on my Birthday. Yay pizza!

Bittorrent is the latest Killer Ap.

So, according to this article, bittorrent and its files are now using up roughly 1/3 of the Internet's current bandwidth. I must confess that right at this moment I am using it to download the last piece of the 'Future is Wild' special that I failed to completely tape while it was on TV last summer, so I can see how this could be possible.

The thing is, while _sps_ and I were at Softguard, we came up with a design for a peer-to-peer system that would be superior (IMNSHO) to bittorent, in that it would not only  distribute chunks in a bittorrent-like manner but would also spawn broadcast nodes when under heavy use, would support wiki-like editing of file metadata (including license info) and would allow for 'latent' searches that could continue while you were logged off. There may even be a good revenue model for it, but that would require careful design and consideration.

da Vinci's Automata.

According to this article in wired, Leonardo da Vinci's 'failed' spring-powered car may actually have been a design for an analog cam-programmed and spring-powered robot that could be set to run a fixed course by carefully changing its cams. CAD reconstructions of the car according to this new theory seem to work just fine.

Global Warming

I've long been a skeptic of Global Warming. Not that I don't think that we're having an effect on the Earth's Climate, and not that I don't think there's evidence right now that the Earth is warming up. What I'm a skeptic of is the so-called science behind this. I know enough about computer modelling that when I read a paper on a climate model, I can see where the underlying assumptions are being coded in. That's no way to prove anything. By the same token, I've spent more than a few hours reading up on how the various measurements and such are being performed. Most of them are horribly flawed. So, my opinion is that we may, or may not, be having the effect on the climate that most folks say we are. The data is just too ambiguous and the paleoclimate records of Earth, such as we've been able to reconstruct, show that the planet has been both much hotter and much cooler than it is now, sometimes switching back and forth within a few decades, and we don't know any of the why or how it happens. Until we have a model for how the Earth's climate behaves in the long-term without human intervention we'll never have a hope of figuring out what changes we're making to it. Heck the Global Warming may be due to no more than the fact that we're just leaving an Ice Age, and the normal interglacial temperature of the planet is a lot hotter than it is now. I've even seen studies that if it weren't for the defoestation of Jerusalem and other areas in the Middle East in antiquity, we would right now be slipping back into an Ice Age. In short, we just don't know.

Anyway, here is one of the more balanced articles I've seen in some time that discusses the ongoing changes in the planet's glaciation.

XeroCoat: Permanent Antifogging, Antiscratch Coating.

Scientists in Australia have created a new way to process glass in mirrors, windows and other surfaces so that it is highly resistant to scratching or fogging. They call the new technology XeroCoat. Sounds quite useful to me, especially as its supposedly dirt cheap to do.

The Today.

Today I managed to get through a bunch of emails to the point that I'm almost back where I'm supposed to be. Other than that, I discovered and debugged a problem on the firewall, but my fix is just temporary -- it'll go away when I reboot. I want to figure out why a value of 2048 in ip_conntrack_max was insufficient before I make a setting of 4096 permanent.

Open Access Journals.

I thought this list might be relevant to some of my friends:
( Click for a list of open-access web journals )