Yes, it hasn't been that long since we discussed the same web. Wouldn't you know it, the new CBC story is at the same URL, only they apparently added some photos.
Spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) is one of the biggest problems I face on the net. It consumes a few minutes of my time every day just so some sleazeball can advertise his junk to millions of people at a time. Man-years of productivity are lost for every spam sent to a few million people.
Actually, I don't, but I've read plenty of their stuff:-). I'm one of the leaders for the Carolina Space Frontier Society, I'm on a multitude of space news e-mail lists, and I occasionally forward space news to the club e-mail list. Sometimes, I find a story that didn't come with a synopsis and warrants one aimed at a general audience, and I write the intro. Some of those introductions I submit to/. Read all my submissions (accepted or not) in my journal.
But as soon as you finish typing the RFC with the better e-mail protocol including your verification step, some spammer (or better yet, a well-intentioned open source author who doesn't want to be bothered by the extra step) will write an automatic responder, which the spammer will have running in no time. It won't afford any more information than the existing "Received:" lines at the tops of messages. Unfortunately, the only way for that scheme to work is for it to be non-standard.
5 years ago, I was the victim of a bad check - a "customer" in Texas paid by check for my C.O.D. shipment of RAM. The biggest problem with collecting the money (which I attempted with no success) was identifying the criminal, the person who handed the bad check to the letter carrier. There were name, address, and driver's license number on the check, but the letter carrier needed to testify that the defendant standing there in the courtroom was actually the same person who handed the check over. How would a letter carrier remember one face out of thousands in a month?
A fingerprint applied to a check - perhaps even in place of a signature - isn't so bad an idea. It offers positive identification of the person handing the check over. Collecting fingerprints? Data mining? There may be some commercial value to the absolute identity of the person handing the check, but they already collect your name, address, driver's license number, and so forth.
If you want anonymity in your transactions, use cash.
...when she answered the phone holding a cardboard mask on a stick front of her early-morning face so as not to freighten the caller. As I recall, Jane had a closet full of masks!
Re:ASCII art? ANSI was much better...
on
Google Art Creator
·
· Score: 2
Ah, yes, and the ANSI animations - quite possible because of the tediously slow data transfer rates of the day. On the BBS we ran, The Igmeister Zone, we spruced up the code so every once in awhile when the user least expected it, an ANSI animation of the Energizer Bunny would come marching across the screen - of course right around the time they came out with the bunny.
By my reading, the press release provides one more way you could conclude there was once life on Mars. There were four others well documented as of mid 1999:
The lines of evidence which indicate possible biogenic activity in the martian meteorite ALH84001 (McKay et al., 1996) are: (1) the presence of carbonate globules which had been formed at temperatures favorable for life, (2) the presence of biomenerals (magnetites and sulfides) with characteristics nearly identical to those formed by certain bacteria, (3) the presence of indigenous reduced carbon within Martian materials, and (4) the presence in the carbonate globules of features similar in morphography to biological structures. Each of these phenomena could be interpreted as having biogenic origins but the unique spatial relationships indicated that, collectively, they recorded evidence of past biogenic activity within the meteorite.
This is just one of several ways they've decided there was probably life in the ALH80001 meteorite. From the press release:
The researchers used six physical properties they refer to as
the Magnetite Assay for Biogenicity (MAB) to compare all the
magnetic material found in the ancient meteorite -- using the
MAB as a biosignature.
Earlier, a number of other scientists observed chemical and visible (through an electron microscope) formations indicitive of biology. NASA astrobiologist Dr. Richard Hoover explains in an interview from December '96:
Carbonate is a mineral that on earth is commonly produced by the action of microorganisms. Limestone is an example. Furthermore, the carbonate globules in ALH84001 are similar in size and texture to carbonate precipitates that are often formed by terrestrial bacteria. [David S. McKay et al. of JSC] demonstrated that these carbonate globules contained fine-grained secondary phases of single domain magnetites and iron sulfides. These minerals probably formed in water solutions at temperatures amenable to microbial life. This result is extremely significant.
Furthermore, on the skepticism, Dr. Hoover points out:
The biggest controversy is over whether or not the rock contains evidence of microorganisms, and therein lies the most fundamental question. There's the frequently quoted saying, "Extraordinary results require extraordinary proof." It's true that scientists must always exercise careful skepticism. However, skepticism can reach a point where valid evidence can be rejected simply because it does not fit into the conventional view of the world at that time. Sometimes scientists also oppose new ideas because they may contradict ideas that one has published in a paper years earlier.
Some years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by
Dr. Richard Hoover,
leader of the Astrobiology Group at NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center, on
the prospect of life on Mars, particularly based on things he had found in
the ALH80001 meteorite.
Many people question the science, but it would seem people should question the
scientific community which has held its hands over its eyes when faced with
the prospect of life on other planets. The community is just now peeking between
its fingers and beginning to accept that there might be life elsewhere. In the
presentation I attended, Dr. Hoover noted that NASA set up rules in advance of
the Viking missions - that any one of the several (4?) tests coming back positive
would be indicative of life on the red planet, but once some of the tests came
back positive, they decided that all of the tests had to be positive to
confirm the existence of life on Mars. Such has been the distinctly non-scientific
approach of the community when confronted with the distinct possibility of life on
other planets.
But you can't see those things with binoculars. You have to drag out the 10 m (394 inch) telescope to make them out. Of those in the list, the biggest one has an H (Vm) of 18.25 (1999 VP11, which came close in 1965), with most numbers in the mid to upper 20's. (Smaller number means bigger rock, so says the legend at the bottom of the table.) 2002 NY 40 has an H (Vm) of 19.03. Perhaps we might have seen 1999 VP11 had we known to look for it.
Looking at the future table, we might get out the binoculars to see these rocks on the given days:
1999 AN10 2027-Aug-07
1999 RQ36 2080-Sep-23
But there aren't all that many rocks that we know about on the way here.
Twice a century? Perhaps a little more often - and if we get more funding for watching for the Big One, we'll likely find out about substantially more rocks coming close, so if you miss this one, there's a fair chance you'll catch the next show.
Why not just structure expectations (and law) such that commercial software comes with some warranty by default and non-commercial software doesn't? Then you get into the problem of defining commercial and non-commercial, but that seems far easier than requiring all non-commercial software to include fancy mechanisms to disclaim warranties.
Sure, government can benefit from using open source from the regular OS community, but government can benefit from contributing to the community, too.
I'm working on a couple of projects they tell me will be open source (I haven't seen the license yet, but I expect it to be fine) for the EPA. There are some good reasons for making it open source:
The same physics apply everywhere. I write one Gaussian plume atmospheric transport routine, and it works for anyone who wants to use it.
People can review the work. Other models do the same thing, but the source code is not available. Meteorologists aren't going to reverse-engineer the code and figure out what's going on. They would rather be able to review it outright.
It helps other organizations which have the same problems.
Granted, the particular code that processes data for the Regional Haze Rule isn't very helpful to anyone but the EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the states, but consider the utility of open source library software, call tracking software, document retrieval software, GIS applications, and more.
There are a number of special purpose applications that governments have a particular need for, and there's no reason everyone should develop the software separately.
Would the RF signal be that clear? Consider that for timing purposes, you just listen for the first crack of thunder, and likewise listen for just the first bit of static from the lightning. But an electrical storm is full of little bits of static discharge, and you'd be interested in its location on the ground - would that also be the first bit of signal received? Only when the lightning travels ground to cloud, otherwise the signal from the cloud end would show up first. Since lightning travels slower than light speed, it's hard to tell where on the ground the strike was by observing the first bit of static. Lightning travels faster than sound, so you can listen for the first sound, and it will have come from close to the ground. By using the EM radiation together with sound, you avoid all the complexities of the lightning's path effecting the EM radiation or the sound.
Actually, the microphones don't have to be directional. First, the antenna picks up the radio noise of the lightning strike, then some time (measured) elapses, and the first microphone receives the signal. At that moment, you know the lightning struck on a circle of appropriate radius around that one microphone.* Wait a fraction of a second, and another microphone hears it. You can then draw another circle around the second microphone, and it overlaps the first in only two places. Wait until the third microphone picks it up, draw your third circle, and they will only overlap in one place. Add another microphone for increased accuracy, and you're done. The microphones could be in any configuration, but the farther apart they are, they more accurate the results can be.
* Try this at home: Count the time until lightning arrives. It's about 5 seconds per mile (3 seconds per kilometer), so divide the number of seconds by 5 and you get the lightning's distance in miles (by 3 for km). If you know the distance to the lightning (without the direction), you know that the lightning struck somewhere on a circle with that radius and you at the center.
[BTW: For more unit conversions than you can shake a stick at, visit Russ Rowlett's Units of Measure site which helped me check the numbers above.]
For those of you just tuning in, Auerbach was elected to the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) board in November 2000 by the public at large. According to a Salon primer, ICANN "had already earned a reputation for ineptitude and closed-door policies that favor corporate interests.... Auerbach intended to guide ICANN toward reform." He requested access to the financial records, he says, "[T]o find out where the money goes. Why does it take $2.4 million (47 applicants paid $50,000 each) to evaluate seven top-level domains?" As a director, according to California law, he was entitled to "the absolute right at any reasonable time to inspect and copy all books, records and documents of every kind," but ICANN thought otherwise, and the suit whose outcome is the topic of this story followed.
just as they do in the magazine industry. Blow-in cards (those pesky things that invariably litter your lap as you read) must work or advertisers wouldn't pay for them. The same goes for their online equivalents. At least many sites employ pop-under ads to spare us the immediate interruption.
Kim Brooks identifies the problem well in the article "Advertising: A Cry for Usability." Brooks points out that advertisers are trying too hard to get their message in front of the consumers, and in so doing, they turn off the consumers. She continues suggesting the best advertisements are those designed to help the consumer, enumerating targeted search results, e-mail list sponsorship, and sponsored default web bookmark lists as laudible forms of advertising. If only the advertisers would pay attention!
[BTW: You can get rid of those pesky X-10 ads for 30 days at a time by visiting their opt-out page which I found in their customer service FAQ.]
What? This story's been up 3 days and no mention of a geiger counter? Better yet, rather than buying your own geiger counter to watch your own nuclear material decay, how about accessing some random numbers over the internet? HotBits (which has been mentioned) will let you do just that.
"While pseudo-random (pronounced "fake random") numbers may be OK for computer science types, Real Engineers get Real Random Numbers by timing nuclear disintegrations with a Geiger-Muller detector." "A few months ago I saw the RM-60 Micro Roentgen Radiation Monitor from Aware Electronics. It is a Geiger-Muller tube that connects to a PC's parallel or serial port, with the circuitry drawing power from a single interface pin."
February 1998 Eric Raymond and friends come up with the term "open source". They apply for trademark status and put up the opensource.org web site.
I thought that looked suspiciously recent for the term "open source", so, in a few minutes of Google groups searching, the earliest reference I found was October 1989, in a post by Chris McDonald from White Sands Missile Range, but he was not talking specifically about computer program source code - just information.
In December 1990, folks were discussing "open source" software, particularly BSD. Thad Florian quoted Kent Paul Dolan using the term, then used it himself.
NPR recently did a story on Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha Ackerman's book telling about the invention and adoption of air conditioning in the United States. In the radio story, she talks about the first applications in factories wanting a stable environment in which to manufacture their goods. Rich people weren't interested - they didn't "sweat." Workers "sweat," gentlemen "perspire," and ladies "glow." The rich went to their summer homes in the mountains, anyway. The biggest challenge was automobile air conditioning - size and efficiency constraints postponed its introduction until about 40 years ago.
Lewis M. Simmons offered this insight in a recent National Geographic article (teaser): China would no sooner cede Tibet to Tibetans than the U.S. would cede South Dakota to the Sioux.
And she won't (though I've managed to thoroughly convince her that Microsoft is not on our side), because it doesn't run Quicken. She likes to keep our finances, and she's grown very accustomed to the many features - retirement planning estimators, savings goals, and other substantial parts of the software beyond balancing the checkbook.
Says Dr Brigitte Senut in a BBC article today. She and others on her team think the skull is that of a female gorilla and the facial features only indicate its gender, not that it is hominid.
Perhaps they really did find the missing link - or perhaps not. Either way, it's an interesting find given its age.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it hasn't been that long since we discussed the same web. Wouldn't you know it, the new CBC story is at the same URL, only they apparently added some photos.
Here's a Spam Primer. The Coalition Against Unsolicited E-mail offers plenty of information as well.
Actually, I don't, but I've read plenty of their stuff :-). I'm one of the leaders for the Carolina Space Frontier Society, I'm on a multitude of space news e-mail lists, and I occasionally forward space news to the club e-mail list. Sometimes, I find a story that didn't come with a synopsis and warrants one aimed at a general audience, and I write the intro. Some of those introductions I submit to /. Read all my submissions (accepted or not) in my journal.
But as soon as you finish typing the RFC with the better e-mail protocol including your verification step, some spammer (or better yet, a well-intentioned open source author who doesn't want to be bothered by the extra step) will write an automatic responder, which the spammer will have running in no time. It won't afford any more information than the existing "Received:" lines at the tops of messages. Unfortunately, the only way for that scheme to work is for it to be non-standard.
A fingerprint applied to a check - perhaps even in place of a signature - isn't so bad an idea. It offers positive identification of the person handing the check over. Collecting fingerprints? Data mining? There may be some commercial value to the absolute identity of the person handing the check, but they already collect your name, address, driver's license number, and so forth. If you want anonymity in your transactions, use cash.
...when she answered the phone holding a cardboard mask on a stick front of her early-morning face so as not to freighten the caller. As I recall, Jane had a closet full of masks!
... me to lead us all in a round of "Amazing Grace"
Ah, yes, and the ANSI animations - quite possible because of the tediously slow data transfer rates of the day. On the BBS we ran, The Igmeister Zone, we spruced up the code so every once in awhile when the user least expected it, an ANSI animation of the Energizer Bunny would come marching across the screen - of course right around the time they came out with the bunny.
The following excerpt is from Gibson, E.K. Jr., McKay, D.S., et al. Life on Mars: evaluation of the evidence within Martian meteorites ALH84001, Nakhla, and Shergotty", Precambrian Research 106:15-34.
See also NASA's astrobiology news page and my earlier comment.
Earlier, a number of other scientists observed chemical and visible (through an electron microscope) formations indicitive of biology. NASA astrobiologist Dr. Richard Hoover explains in an interview from December '96:
Furthermore, on the skepticism, Dr. Hoover points out:
See my other comment on this story with links to pictures and more supporting background information.
SPIE-The International Society for Optical Engineering captured the bulk of Dr. Hoover's presentation in an interview published in their December '96 magazine. This September 1998 article offers pictures of the fossils found, as does a July 1997 article. Another story announces a fossil find in another meteorite that fell on Murchison, Victoria, Australia.
Many people question the science, but it would seem people should question the scientific community which has held its hands over its eyes when faced with the prospect of life on other planets. The community is just now peeking between its fingers and beginning to accept that there might be life elsewhere. In the presentation I attended, Dr. Hoover noted that NASA set up rules in advance of the Viking missions - that any one of the several (4?) tests coming back positive would be indicative of life on the red planet, but once some of the tests came back positive, they decided that all of the tests had to be positive to confirm the existence of life on Mars. Such has been the distinctly non-scientific approach of the community when confronted with the distinct possibility of life on other planets.
More links:
Looking at the future table, we might get out the binoculars to see these rocks on the given days:
But there aren't all that many rocks that we know about on the way here.Twice a century? Perhaps a little more often - and if we get more funding for watching for the Big One, we'll likely find out about substantially more rocks coming close, so if you miss this one, there's a fair chance you'll catch the next show.
Why not just structure expectations (and law) such that commercial software comes with some warranty by default and non-commercial software doesn't? Then you get into the problem of defining commercial and non-commercial, but that seems far easier than requiring all non-commercial software to include fancy mechanisms to disclaim warranties.
I'm working on a couple of projects they tell me will be open source (I haven't seen the license yet, but I expect it to be fine) for the EPA. There are some good reasons for making it open source:
- The same physics apply everywhere. I write one Gaussian plume atmospheric transport routine, and it works for anyone who wants to use it.
- People can review the work. Other models do the same thing, but the source code is not available. Meteorologists aren't going to reverse-engineer the code and figure out what's going on. They would rather be able to review it outright.
- It helps other organizations which have the same problems.
Granted, the particular code that processes data for the Regional Haze Rule isn't very helpful to anyone but the EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the states, but consider the utility of open source library software, call tracking software, document retrieval software, GIS applications, and more.There are a number of special purpose applications that governments have a particular need for, and there's no reason everyone should develop the software separately.
See a map of the crater accompanying the National Geographic story.
Would the RF signal be that clear? Consider that for timing purposes, you just listen for the first crack of thunder, and likewise listen for just the first bit of static from the lightning. But an electrical storm is full of little bits of static discharge, and you'd be interested in its location on the ground - would that also be the first bit of signal received? Only when the lightning travels ground to cloud, otherwise the signal from the cloud end would show up first. Since lightning travels slower than light speed, it's hard to tell where on the ground the strike was by observing the first bit of static. Lightning travels faster than sound, so you can listen for the first sound, and it will have come from close to the ground. By using the EM radiation together with sound, you avoid all the complexities of the lightning's path effecting the EM radiation or the sound.
* Try this at home: Count the time until lightning arrives. It's about 5 seconds per mile (3 seconds per kilometer), so divide the number of seconds by 5 and you get the lightning's distance in miles (by 3 for km). If you know the distance to the lightning (without the direction), you know that the lightning struck somewhere on a circle with that radius and you at the center.
[BTW: For more unit conversions than you can shake a stick at, visit Russ Rowlett's Units of Measure site which helped me check the numbers above.]
For those of you just tuning in, Auerbach was elected to the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) board in November 2000 by the public at large. According to a Salon primer, ICANN "had already earned a reputation for ineptitude and closed-door policies that favor corporate interests. ... Auerbach intended to guide ICANN toward reform." He requested access to the financial records, he says, "[T]o find out where the money goes. Why does it take $2.4 million (47 applicants paid $50,000 each) to evaluate seven top-level domains?" As a director, according to California law, he was entitled to "the absolute right at any reasonable time to inspect and copy all books, records and documents of every kind," but ICANN thought otherwise, and the suit whose outcome is the topic of this story followed.
Kim Brooks identifies the problem well in the article "Advertising: A Cry for Usability." Brooks points out that advertisers are trying too hard to get their message in front of the consumers, and in so doing, they turn off the consumers. She continues suggesting the best advertisements are those designed to help the consumer, enumerating targeted search results, e-mail list sponsorship, and sponsored default web bookmark lists as laudible forms of advertising. If only the advertisers would pay attention!
[BTW: You can get rid of those pesky X-10 ads for 30 days at a time by visiting their opt-out page which I found in their customer service FAQ.]
Terry Ritter offers us "Random Number Machines: A Literature Survey" which discusses random numbers from noise and other sources. Well worth a look.
Ritter expounds on Geiger counters:
Now they also offer canned software - a random number generator based on radioactive decay.
In December 1990, folks were discussing "open source" software, particularly BSD. Thad Florian quoted Kent Paul Dolan using the term, then used it himself.
NPR recently did a story on Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning , Marsha Ackerman's book telling about the invention and adoption of air conditioning in the United States. In the radio story, she talks about the first applications in factories wanting a stable environment in which to manufacture their goods. Rich people weren't interested - they didn't "sweat." Workers "sweat," gentlemen "perspire," and ladies "glow." The rich went to their summer homes in the mountains, anyway. The biggest challenge was automobile air conditioning - size and efficiency constraints postponed its introduction until about 40 years ago.
Lewis M. Simmons offered this insight in a recent National Geographic article (teaser): China would no sooner cede Tibet to Tibetans than the U.S. would cede South Dakota to the Sioux.
And she won't (though I've managed to thoroughly convince her that Microsoft is not on our side), because it doesn't run Quicken. She likes to keep our finances, and she's grown very accustomed to the many features - retirement planning estimators, savings goals, and other substantial parts of the software beyond balancing the checkbook.
Perhaps they really did find the missing link - or perhaps not. Either way, it's an interesting find given its age.