Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• Still sniffling, still congested, still coughing, and still mostly lying on my back, taking a Zicam every three hours like clockwork. I feel better generally, but the growing pile of Kleenex on the floor next to the bed provides time-trend rather than anecdotal data. This has been worse and tougher to shake than I had hoped.
• The Cassini Saturn probe can actually watch ring disturbances occur, especially those caused by the way-far-in moon Prometheus. Here's the culprit making tracks in the ring system, courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.
• There is a portable version of Scribus, the only open-source desktop publishing system that I respect. One key principle of degunking Windows PCs is to staythehell away from the Windows Registry, and portable apps, almost by definition, leave no fingerprints there. There's more here than most people understand, and Wikipedia's list of portable apps is a very good place to start. (I advise reading the entry talk page.) Here's another big list.
• Another key principle is to avoid software that insists on launching services all the time, having tray icons, etc. Most of these are commercial packages that are desperately trying to upsell you. Best path here is to avoid commercial software as much as possible, especially trialware and "basic" versions that are invitations to install nagware and are often very hard to get rid of.
• (Next morning.) The nose is drying out (finally) but the cough is still with me. About to head out for some yummy McDonald's iced coffee, with sugar-free vanilla flavoring, to chase a delectable Sausage McMuffin with Egg. I'm stuffing my pocketses with Kleenex, but after two days of self-enforced isolation, it's almost within my grasp: The Contrarian Breakfast of Champions!
• (Later.) It's been a bad season for the Global Warming crowd. Freeman Dyson jumped the Tiber, and now says that the whole thing is a religion. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has admitted under duress that its Antarctic bases have shown a cooling trend since 1980. Another Australian, albeit a hated Tory, penned a pretty good summary of the problems to be found when you study the data and not the dogma. Word seems to be getting out: Only 30% of Americans support cap-and-trade, which has become corrupt even before becoming law. And here's what one of the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey bill has to say about the dangers of global warming. OMG, if that tundra at the North Pole ever emerges from under the ice, we're all gonna die!
• Remember Global Cooling? I lived through it. It was scary. The lesson? We knew shit about how climate worked in 1975. And today? We know shit plus 15%. Some humility (and caution) are called for.
• (Still later.) Gosh. I really must be feeling better. The needle has climbed out of "groggy" and is rising rapidly through "puckish" on its way back to "jovial and unprovocative." Dare I hope to get all the way to "serene"? Not likely; the viruses are surrendering, but I still have 35,000 words to go on the book--and I can't find any Diet Green River!

It was five below zero when we got up this morning, and The Weather Channel indicated that this was a new record low for December 15 in Colorado Springs. It was so damned cold out on the back deck this morning that the dogs didn't want to do their business; they just stood there looking pitiful, picking up one foot and then another until we let them in. That was 6:30 AM. Mid-afternoon, it's up to a sweltering ten degrees Farenheit right now, and Aero was willing to lift his leg at least once without trying to lift all four feet simultaneously.

We've started to see a pattern here. When we first moved to Colorado Springs it was dry and relatively warm. Between 2002 and 2006 the area was in a deepish drought, with much fear that our reservoirs up in the Rockies were running dry. Snow was sparse and didn't amount to much. Water restrictions were austere, and we designed our house and yard such that little nor no watering would have to be done. Everything's on a dripper, with a sensor in the rain gutter ready to shut the system down for several days after any detectable rain. Oh, and I have zero grass to mow.

The last two winters here, however, have been much colder and snowier, and have begun significantly earlier. People used to joke about golfing on Christmas Day; well, not since 2006. We had plenty of rain last spring and summer, and the reservoirs are full enough so that nobody's worried. The city has complained, in fact, that citizens have been so good about conserving water that their water revenues are down "critically." It was a good excuse to try to raise taxes, but they have to ask us first in Colorado, and we whipped their greedy asses this recent election cycle. The city's response? Forget cutting expenses. Repeal the water restrictions, environment be damned. (Goes to show you how much governments really "care.")

So we're buckling down here for a long, cold, and expensive winter. I find it interesting that over the past few years, whenever there occurred any weather that somebody somewhere didn't like, it was immediately ascribed to Global Warming™—unless it was colder-than-average temps. Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, what have you: Global Warming™! Cold arctic air over Nebraska? Umm, well, errrr...let's see what the weather's like in Costa Rica! And how 'bout them Blackhawks!

It was, of course, a horrible mistake to call anthropogenic climate change "global warming" to begin with. We know almost nothing about the forces that bear on climate. We know to some extent what climate was like in the past, but we have almost no idea why particular changes occurred when and where they did. Our computer climate models are garbage. The science is not so much bad as absent. And even though regional cooling is as likely an effect of elevated CO2 levels as regional warming, voters who are half-bankrupted by winter heating bills are going to going to cast a jaundiced eye on the alarmists who spun tales of melting icecaps and smothering heat. Like almost everything else, it's a lot more complex and subtle than that.

We need to work on reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This begins and mostly ends with wholesale adoption of nuclear energy. (If you don't think so, show me the math for your solution.) We also need to admit that we know almost nothing about what changes in atmospheric chemistry can actually do. We are not good at this. We are really not good at this. Reducing CO2 levels could cause regional warming—or another Ice Age. The science just isn't there. Let us not pretend that we are smarter than we are, shall we? (We were clearly not smart enough to avoid using an idiot's moniker like "global warming" to describe a difficult and subtle scientific challenge.)

• I'm not quite as ga-ga as the reporter, but make no mistake: This is one of the most startling deep-space videos ever taken, of the Moon making a transit across the Earth, seen from a distance of fifty million kilometers. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
• My nephew Brian just bought a Blackberry cellphone and is trying to find a software package that will allow him to sync his Google Calendar data with the phone. This is something I've never had to do (I do not currently have a PDA nor a smartphone) and so I'm looking for suggestions.
• Eat kohlrabi, Dean Ornish: A long-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that low-carb diets are significantly better at helping people lose weight and lower cholesterol than low-fat diets. As complex as the obesity issue is, I speak to people again and again and again who have found what we've found in their own lives: Lowering fat does not help much. Lowering carbs, and especially lowering sugar, helps a lot.
• Carol and I were down in Lincoln Park the other day, and saw saturation advertising for a wind-powered condo complex that intrigued me enough to write the Web address down across Heath Ledger's late face on the Red Eye. Take a look and read the fine print. Those well-hidden wind turbines on the roof generate up to 2% of the building's electricity. And so wind power takes its place as a techno-fetish among the terminally hip and the gorgeously clueless. Larger turbines could generate significantly more of the building's power, but the neighbors might complain—and that's not hip at all, is it?

• A reader wrote to tell me that I am "MSG blind," (see my entry for July 14, 2008) which means that MSG does not affect my taste chemistry—and that people who are MSG blind are generally the people who react badly to the chemical. Alas, I can't find anything about this online, but it's an interesting idea.
• Screw the polar bears. The big downside to Global Warming™ is now kidney stones. Ouch.
• I hadn't heard much about the Casimir Effect recently, but courtesy Frank Glover, here's a good article on modifying nanoscale structures to minimize "stiction" due to Casimir forces. More speculative but lots more fun are some links at the end describing projects attempting to harness Casimir forces in various ways, many or most of which still seem a little whiffy. (I made enthusiastic use of vacuum energy in my novel, The Cunning Blood.)
• The Washington Post suggests that we strap engines on the ISS and send it to the Moon, to act as an orbital station to help stage travel to a lunar base. Maybe a little far fetched, but only a little—and we're not doing much with the damned thing where it's sitting right now.
• And as if NASA didn't have enough to worry about, now, well, scientists are telling them that they had better establish an officially sanctioned 200-mile-high club.
• The acronym is unfortunate, but Sandisk's write-once read-many (WORM) SD card has an application that isn't even mentioned in the press release: A unit for mounting a hack-proof operating system instance. No mention what the access time is (I'm guessing slowwwww) but it's an approach that many people have been calling for for some years.
• Finally, as a proud godfather of two nieces who are big for their ages but still very small, this video made me cringe a little. (Don't parents have enough to worry about?) Quick, how long would it take you mechanical engineer types to devise a sheet-metal flap valve to fix this problem?

• Aero won his first "major" (a win against at least three other males of his breed) at the Colorado Springs Kennel Club dog show this past weekend. That gives him a total of five points toward the fifteen he needs (and the first of two majors) to win his championship.
• Shopping a little harder for gas these days? This site may help, keeping in mind that driving miles to save pennies isn't always a win—and the price could change before you get there. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
• Neal Rest sent me a pointer to "Ten Things I Hate About Commandments," which is a parody trailer made as a remix of scenes from a very famous movie that you may recognize. It's less a parody of the film than of film trailers in general, and very funny.
• From Roy Harvey comes a link to a paper containing a great deal of data on historical climate change. I don't agree with all the points made by the author, but the paper is so thick with graphs that I'm not sure his conclusions are the real value-add here. Do take a look.
• One of the scariest videos I've seen in a while shows a good-sized house literally sliding into the rampaging Wisconsin River and floating away downstream. Lake Delton, near Wisconsin Dells and home of the (in)famous Tommy Bartlett Water Ski and Jumping Boat Thrill Show, basically created a new channel for itself and drained completely into the Wisconsin River, driven by massive rains. The Dells themselves weren't directly affected, but a great deal of aquatic activity on Lake Delton (duck boats, jet skis, and poor Tommy) are now gone for the rest of the 2008 season. (And we're going to the Dells this July!)
• Missed including this one a couple of months ago, but it's worth some consideration: Blogging has become the new work-at-home piecework, with "professional" (read here: sometimes paid) bloggers working themselves literally to death for as little as $10 per post. Damn, I wish my blog earned me that little! (Here's a counterpoint that misses the point a little, but worth reading for balance.)
• Finally, I stumbled on Curious Expeditions while trying to find aerial photos of the Roman Catholic church I grew up in on the Web. No dice on the church (it's so ugly the parish Web site contains no photos of it!) but if you want to see a picture of a petrified bat, Galileo's mummified middle finger (now, who did he give it to?) or hundreds of other peculiar things, this is the place. It's not all creepshow stuff, either: The entry on New York City's pneumatic message system (similar to the legendary pneu of France) is the best treatment I've seen on the American side of the subject.

• Carol and I were at the Longmont Dog Show over the weekend, and Aero got another two blue ribbons, though that was in the Open Dog category and didn't yield him any points. I actually "handled" (took around the show ring) another dog owned by Aero's breeder Jimi Henton. Showing Jackie (Jimi's Hit the Jackpot) was fun, especially since Jackie is the biggest, heaviest, strongest bichon any of us has ever seen (23 pounds, all of it muscle!) and there's nothing the least bit fussy about him.
• The Make blog aggregated an item on making your own railcarts and railbkes. I've often thought that this might be fun (it's certainly nothing new) but the snag is that when railroads abandon a run of track, they typically tear up the rails for scrap almost immediately. The mere presence of iron suggests that trains come through, if only occasionally, and that would make me nervous. I have been looking for but have not yet found an index of track sections where trains are known not to run.
• In the certifiable Brain Sludge category of Web content falls Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide, which lists (and in most cases shows images of) all the characters hawking cereal on boxes and commercials that you've ever heard of, and I suspect more than a few that you haven't. The list also includes purely fictional cereals like Calvin's Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and Admiral Crunch and Archduke Chocula from Futureama. Early versions of the Rice Crispies Elves are interesting—and I never knew that Tony the Tiger had a spouse. All here.
• Speaking of cereal, this article confirms my grocery-store math: House brands cost as much as 40% less than largely indistinguishable name brands. If you're spending more for gas, at least spend less on Rice Chex. The only type of cereal where house brands taste distinctly different to me are oat toruses, or whateverthehell you call them in the generic—Cheerios clones. The house brands are not necessary bad (in fact, the Trader Joe's house brand oat toruses are distinctly better) but it's odd that all the chex and the flakes can't be told apart but Cheerios brooks no imitation. By the way, most house brand cereals are made by Ralston Foods. Here's their list. Of interest to geometers are Crispy Hexagons. What, no Crispy Dodecahedrons?
• And to round out the discussion of nostaligic carbs, I regret to inform all who may care that Dressel's Cakes are really and truly gone forever. Their distinctive frozen whipped-cream chocolate cake was a Chicago standard for 75 years, coming from their plant at 66th and Ashland Avenues, but the firm was bought by a French company a few years ago and dismantled for reasons unclear. (I'm glad I can still get Green River!)
• Mike Reith sent a pointer to goosh, a purely textual interface to Google that works a lot like the Unix shell. Could this be useful to the vision-impaired?
• There are no visible sunspots right now, and according to several items I've read, there have been none for some weeks, and very few for months, all the way back into the middle of last year. Ham radio guys (like me) track sunspot activity closely because it affects shortwave radio propagation. Here's a sample. It's probably too early to worry, but long-term sunspot minima have been very bad juju in the past.

• Here at the condo this morning, I can't bring up squat on the Web because everybody's out there trying to figure out who won the Democratic primaries last night. So I did an absolutely unheard of thing: I went down to the White Hen, got some of their great coffee, and picked up a newspaper. What a notion.
• I'm hearing more and more people say that Wi-Fi doesn't work as well as it used to, which is weird because microwave physics hasn't changed recently. But...look at how many APs Windows can see from wherever you are. From my kitchen table here, NetStumbler sensed twelve APs...and walking around inside our dinky little condo picked up four more. Three of the strongest signals were on default Channel 6—and five out of sixteen were cleverly named "linksys." I don't think it's the physics, folks.
• After Meetup.com went all-paid (and highly paid) I investigated an alternative called Gatheroo, which later (in response to another damfool lawsuit from somebody) became Zanby. The site's been redesigned and is worth a look if you want to start a meatspace social network where you live. There are both free and paid levels of participation, and it's certainly not as expensive as Meetup.
• Matthew Reed (and lots of others after him) sent me pointers to articles about the recent implementation of memristors, which are a species of passive electronic component postulated in 1971 but not actually implemented until HP researchers made some earlier this year. Whether this interests you varies directly by the strength of your passion for electronics, and whereas I understand the concept now, my head is still spinning trying to figure out what it implies. Everybody's talking about better computer memory, sure...but what could this do in simple analog circuits?
• Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to a YouTube video about a flame triode amplifier/oscillator lashup, and guys, you gotta see this. It's basically a vacuum tube without either vacuum or tube: When the electrodes get hot, it starts amplifying. I don't fully understand the physics yet, but this would be one fantastic high school science fair project. The question arose in our local group as to whether this could be considered steampunkish, and I'm not sure. People in the steampunk era had no problems generating reasonably hard vacuum and blowing glass envelopes. What they had problems with was understanding electrons. Nonetheless, with a big enough flame and some honkin' batteries, you could have done some impressive things back in 1888.
• Global Cooling adherents have been sending me pointers to Watts Up With That, and Icecaps.us. Fascinating reading, including numerous facets of the climate change discussion that you won't see in Big Media. F'rinstance: Weather monitoring installations that were built sixty or seventy years ago out in the leafy countryside have recently become surrounded by new development, buildings, pavement, etc., and as a result are now in the middle of heat islands. What might that do to long-term temperature data? Hmmmm....

Sure, maybe the guy's a nut, but I'm a contrarian and I love heresies. There certainly seem to be fewer sunspots this cycle than we're used to, and cooling climate trends are definitely correlated with things like the Dalton Minimum and the Maunder Minimum. I've sometimes wondered if the Little Ice Age was "little" because we aborted it by throwing CO2 into the atmosphere in serious quantities. Absent that, we might all be cavemen in an ice wilderness by now.

Ahh. Maybe the Earth really has a little old lady named Gaia somewhere pulling strings. Maybe prescient whales (or sentient mushroom rings in the English forests) saw it coming and carefully guided the evolution of humanity so that it would control fire. Fire is addictive. Do enough of it, and you can keep the atmosphere warm through the greenhouse effect. Maybe the Earth got tired of being cold, and it evolved us because it didn't have any leg warmers.

Climate is an interesting business. The Earth seems to teeter between fire and ice, but from what we know of our geophysical history it prefers ice. If the sunspot dearth is a leading indicator of reduced solar activity, we may have a few years to do...what? Buy Hummers? Whoops. We already tried that.

Ok, ok, correlation is not causation. I'll shut up. Still... At least in Colorado Springs, this was The Winter That Wouldn't End. And it snowed in Chicago last night. If this keeps up I'm moving back to Arizona, thank you very much. I hear that when the ice sheets get as far south as Nebraska, the mammoth hunting is better there.