Sun, 16 Oct 2011
As you may have noticed, I'm testing DIASPORA* as a blogging platform. Its been working reasonably well recently for me, with friends and family; even though the "Main" platform joindiaspora.com is not giving general invites, the code works and a bunch of distributed 'pods' have been set up.
You can make entries public, and I've tested a public address for this: http://diaspora.sceal.ie/u/amckinstry which looks ok, a bit plain for the moment, but I'll work on that later. The problem has been the atom feed is garbage. (It's putting the content into both the Subject line (as unadulterated MarkDown, no less), and into the content).
So, I've put the old blog back up for the moment. While I debug some Ruby on Rails, not a language i'm too familiar with ...
Note: only logged in DIASPORA users can leave notes on the Diaspora site, but go to the login page and registrations are open. At least until spammers notice...
Wed, 05 May 2010
The EGU conference is packed, and this blog isn't anything remotely like real-time, but some interesting talks came up on Monday evening :
Simon Katterhorn gave a neat presentarion on icy moon tectonics, specifically on Europa and Enceladus. He showed the cycloid tracks on Europa, and how these are probably generated by tidally-driven ice tectonics. The presence of these of different ages shows the existence of a global ocean underneath, and the decoupled ice shell on top. More on this can be seen in Greenbergs book on Europa; but he also showed further follow-on work on Enceladus. Enceladus is small enough that people thought it had cooled and could not support an ocean, explaining the geysers and plumes by "small reservoirs". He shows instead that the 'tiger stripes' at the south pole are also tidally-created stresses, and moreover older generations of stripes, at an angle to the current ones, are also present: the plumes occur at the intersections. This shows free rotation of the ice shell and almost certainly an ocean. As to how to heat it: tidal heating is the primary candidate.
I'm looking forward to Tidal heating and orbital evolution of Enceladus on Thursday.
Tue, 04 May 2010
I'm at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, 2010, the biggest gethering of European geoscientists, in Vienna, May 2-7. This is my first time here and its huge: over 9000 participants. Merely finding the talks and posters is a challenge (they supply a USB stick with the abstracts and agendas as they can't print them all!
The first day I spent mostly at the exoplanet stream (and putting up my own poster). Some neat stuff on show: summaries by Borucki on Keplers findings (on the Hot Jupiters they found :" these things glow like a blast furnace; forget life"). He points out that when they look for Earth sized planets, radial velocity confirmation would take 1000s of hours on 10M telescopes - so it won't happen. hmm.
Steve Unwin on SIM: neat astrometric mission for planet hunting and galaxy measurement. A targeted mission list, unlike the Gaia survey; to fly in 2016 if the Decadal survey says yes. 20% of time available under the general observer program, so get proposals ready ?
Nestest poster idea: Anomalous night-time temps on Mars, Gonzales et al.. Finding hot spots on Arsia Mons, a volcano. Explained by air rising from 100km long lava tubes. We've seen pit entrances to caves on Mars with HiRISE, etc. here they model heat output from a pit entrace/exit and imply 100km caves. Oh to go exploring...
Tinetti points out that we lack proper spectra, both experimental and theoretical, for high temperature and pressure gases such as methane, etc. Hmm, I know a group in Galway that might be able to help ...
Helmut Lammer raised an interesting point at the poster session, that many groups ignore the stellar wind when looking at H2 atmospheres around exoplanets. Theis grossly inflates the apparent H2 atmosphere. Without taking this into acount it would be easy to mistake H2 detections with a Neptune-like atmosphere. He points to a 1.7M UV telescope that the Russians are planning to launch that would help do UV measurements when Hubble is gone.
Lena Noack gave a talk on convection in tidally-locked planets (with related poster Low-lid formation on Super-Earths and implications for the habitability of Super-Earths and Sub-Earths). They argue that no covection can be expected in the mantle, and hence no geodynamo or magnetosphere. This could be a problem for holding an atmosphere. Time to check for planetary magnetic fields. Break out the polarimeter ?
Oh, and it seems that That Damned Volcano is closing Irish airspace on Tuesday. Might be an idea to go to the meeting about it. Hope it clears by Friday ...
Wed, 25 Mar 2009
While everybody agrees the current patenting system (especially software patents) is broken, there is little agreement about what to do about it. Many would like to return to some earlier state "when patents worked properly". So here is a proposal, not necessarily a magic bullet, but a step.
The point of patents is/was to make a process "patently clear". Anyone who has read modern patents knows they are anything but clear: they are written in legalese, and engineers and inventors are recommended not to read them: it is both pointless, and dangerous: dangerous, because wilfully infringing patents triples the damages awarded compared to just being ignorant. In other words, you are unlikely to realise that you are infringing a patent (it is so poorly worded) and will accidentally infringe it, earning extra penalties for you diligence in checking.
So the solution: Explicitly make patents something "a person with ordinary skill in the art" shall be expected to have read.
read more »
Fri, 13 Mar 2009
For the day thats in it (a salute to all triskaidekaphobians out there ...)
It appears that the FutureGen Carbon Capture project under Bush was shut down due to an accounting error. According to Physics World:
Oops.
Sun, 22 Feb 2009
While driving home from Letterfrack to Moycullen last night after a pleasant days hillwalking with the family, we saw frogs on the road. Hundreds of them. Over the course of over more than more than twenty kilometres, we saw frogs apparently crossing the road.
Can anyone tell me what was going on? It didn't look as though they were going somewhere in particular. Has they all recently spawned (unlikely) or where they looking for somewhere to spawn ? This was in the early evening: its possible that they all got to the road at dusk. That part of Connemara is all boggy hillside, with individual widely spaced houses. From up on a hill, the linear feature of the road (the N59), especially in the wet, might have been mistaken for a river. Did they head to the road to spawn?
Tue, 23 Dec 2008
Why it is vitally important that eveyone goes to bed early tomorrow night ...
With thanks to Wunderblog.
Sat, 22 Nov 2008
On turning forty, some buy a Ferrari: I got a Brompton bike. A bit more practical (have you seen Galway's roads?), but still fun. I've spent a fair bit abroad this year (ten weeks away on various conferences and working weeks, not including numerous visits to Dublin), lamenting the easy transport while i'm visiting some nice cities. So, the Brompton.
I got the S2L model, the lighest 'standard' model, and the Brompton bag for carrying it aboard planes. I also got the lighter cover and saddle bag, but that has not been as useful as I thought it would be for travelling by train. The Brompton bag, at 2.4 Kg is recommended for planes; its 5 mm padded nylon; quite sturdy (and you can pack socks, etc around the bike, allowing a little extra carrying).
read more »
Wed, 30 Apr 2008
So, the solar panels are now installed, and heating. We're getting the water in the tank heated to around 50 C on these grey days; (there is also an electric immersion coil to heat to 60 degC as necessary, at night-rate electricity). They heat a 300L tank in the utility.
The panels are grant-aided by Sustainable Energy Ireland, and we reckon they'll pay for themselves in 5-8 years, depending on water usage with three kids. Time now to see what the actual savings are.
Thu, 03 Apr 2008
After the April fools joke that wasn't, the hangovers have cleared and OOXML has passed. Unless it is successfully appealed, it will become standard in 2 months. Thankfully, it is being appealed. If you can, lobby your national standards authority to appeal and stop this.
All around the blogosphere, people have been slating ISO for passing this. While a lot of irregularities happened to pass it, for which the ISO should be ashamed, we need to be aware of one thing: ISO is on the good side, folks: we want standards. Most people who are involved in ISO, want good standards. Microsoft don't.
Those on ISO committees felt worldly wise about corporate lobbying: they'd seen it before. They were used to companies lobbying them to rubberstamp their technology as an international standard. But Microsoft were playing a different game. They don't want standards. They already have their monopoly. They don't even want their formats to be standarised. They want to be able to change them every release, and force another sale of Office 2010,etc. What they want to do is trash the idea of standards, and they're succeeding.
ISO was used to being the battleground, the referee. Instead it was the target, and didn't know how to cope.
This battle is like the Celts fighting the Romans. Used to cattle-raids-as-warfare, they hole up and defend themselves when the Romans come marching in, and expect the Romans to give up in a day or two when their 'cattle raid' fails. Instead the Romans dig in for the long siege, and win, while the Celts look on puzzled, and lose.
We need to retake ISO and defend it. I set up the iso-codes project within Debian several years ago to minimize the number of country and language lists out there. Now with OOXML it appears we have to also track the Microsoft list, and incompatabilities, as OOXML requires it. Ditto with DrawingML instead of SVG, and a wholew host of other standards.
Standards committee work is hard and boring. But if we don't get involved theres a lot of boring coding ahead, just tracking Microsoft. Time to join the National standards committees, somehow. Or should we lobby ISO to join as an international body?