Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Peruvian Meteorite May Rewrite Impact Theories
On September 15th of last year, a meteorite impacted the Earth near the town of Carancas in Peru. The story made worldwide headlines when hundreds of people who flocked to see the crater reported getting ill. As it turned out, there were no mysterious space illnesses plaguing the population; the super-hot meteorite likely vaporized arsenic-containing water that was near the surface of the impact site, and onlookers and investigators breathed in the noxious gas. The meteorite is again in the spotlight, though not for making people sick. More...
Vegan diet 'help' for arthritis
Hahahahaha. While all you poor suckers lament your painful, crumbling joints as you age, I will be deftly threading needles and doing jumping jacks. I win!
Sarko is a Pottymouth
I forgot to write about this: French Bling-Bling Prez Nicolas Sarkozy was schmoozing a crowd when someone told him that they didn't want to shake his hand because he'd "already made them dirty." Kinda insulting, sure, to tell the President of your nation you don't want to shake his hand. Any normal person/politician would have just been like, "Okay..." and continued with the rest of the crowd. Not Sarko, though. He told the guy, "Casse toi alors, pauvre con." Rough translation: "Shut up, you stupid cu**". The last two letters of that word are nt, if you didn't know that. Yeah, that's Presidential. Even worse than when Cheney dropped the F-bomb in Congress. Vive la Sarko!
New, Unexpected Spots Found on Jupiter
Jupiter is a spotty place. There's the aptly-named Great Red Spot – a large, long-lasting storm – that we all know and love, and new storms crop up every so often to create interesting features for astronomers both professional and amateur to study. The most recent discovery of new spots can only be seen in the UV, but they add a whole new level of complexity for scientists to chew on. More...
Monday, March 17, 2008
Lookout for Space Junk!
Nancy just had a story up on UT about the discarded stages of rockets falling into Siberia. This photo essay is quite impressive, too. Maybe the Russians should find a better place to launch than the Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan?
Nancy writes in the story, "People who live in the zone are given at least 24 hours' notice of falling debris. Only those outside the zone are entitled to any compensation for damage caused by the launches." Can you imagine getting a warning that a rocket stage might, I don't know, crash through your barn/house? And then the government says, "Well, we warned you. Have fun fixing the hole in your roof!" Not too sure this is the best policy on the part of the Russian Space Agency...
Nancy writes in the story, "People who live in the zone are given at least 24 hours' notice of falling debris. Only those outside the zone are entitled to any compensation for damage caused by the launches." Can you imagine getting a warning that a rocket stage might, I don't know, crash through your barn/house? And then the government says, "Well, we warned you. Have fun fixing the hole in your roof!" Not too sure this is the best policy on the part of the Russian Space Agency...
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Trip Update
In list form, my progress on the Morlaix-Köln trip:
1. Almost finished with the panniers. I have to do a little sewing and install some grommets and velcro, and they'll be done.
2. All of my tent stuff is purchased and tested out. I have to duct tape up some holes in the tarp, and it'll be ready to go. I scored a sleeping bag from a friend.
3. I haven't planned all of the route, but I want to keep it pretty open anyways. I know I have to be to Rouen by the 18th to see my friend there, but my Aachen and Köln friends are pretty flexible as to when I come.
4. My bike needs work. New tires and chain, a new rear derailleur cable and quite probably a new bottom bracket spindle and bearings. It's making noises I really don't like, and I'd hate to be stuck in Belgium with a non-functioning bb bearing.
5. I've been getting in a few kilometers when it's been nice. The wind was blowing 75mph on Monday and Tuesday, so I didn't go out. Discovered the bb problem today, so I might do some mountain riding this week on my roommate's bike instead of risk grinding out the inside of the bb cups with the worn out bearings. We'll see how bad things look when I tear the axle out...
1. Almost finished with the panniers. I have to do a little sewing and install some grommets and velcro, and they'll be done.
2. All of my tent stuff is purchased and tested out. I have to duct tape up some holes in the tarp, and it'll be ready to go. I scored a sleeping bag from a friend.
3. I haven't planned all of the route, but I want to keep it pretty open anyways. I know I have to be to Rouen by the 18th to see my friend there, but my Aachen and Köln friends are pretty flexible as to when I come.
4. My bike needs work. New tires and chain, a new rear derailleur cable and quite probably a new bottom bracket spindle and bearings. It's making noises I really don't like, and I'd hate to be stuck in Belgium with a non-functioning bb bearing.
5. I've been getting in a few kilometers when it's been nice. The wind was blowing 75mph on Monday and Tuesday, so I didn't go out. Discovered the bb problem today, so I might do some mountain riding this week on my roommate's bike instead of risk grinding out the inside of the bb cups with the worn out bearings. We'll see how bad things look when I tear the axle out...
Friday, March 14, 2008
1 in 10^12
I was doing some poking around the internet to familiarize myself with computer processing speeds (ultra-fast supercomputers were the subjects of various podcasts that I listen to). In the definition of a FLOP (floating point operation) on Wikipedia there was this:
* The entire BOINC averages over 900 TFLOPS as of February 17, 2008.[2]
* SETI@Home computes data averages more than 265 TFLOPS.[3]
* Folding@Home has reached over 1 PFLOPS[4] as of September 15, 2007.[5] Note, as of March 22, 2007, PlayStation 3 owners may now participate in the Folding@home project. Because of this, Folding@home is now sustaining considerably higher than 210 TFLOPS (1267 TFLOPS as of September 23, 2007). See the current stats[6] for details.
* Einstein@Home is crunching more than 70 TFLOPS.[7]
* As of June 2007, GIMPS is sustaining 23 TFLOPS.[8]
* Intel Corporation has recently unveiled the experimental multi-core POLARIS chip, which achieves 1 TFLOPS at 3.2 GHz. The 80-core chip can increase this to 1.8 TFLOPS at 5.6 GHz, although the thermal dissipation at this frequency exceeds 260 watts.
I run BOINC all the time, and am a member of the folding@home and Einstein@home projects. This means my computer is part of a supercomputer, calculating protein folding and helping in the search for pulsars. Isn't that cool? Distributed computing is impressive because of how many resources it might save. Instead of building one huge supercomputer that does all of these operations, it's spread over thousands of computers around the world that would otherwise be doing nothing. The users lend their unused computing power to help understand our world better.
I got thinking about how this would impact the environment. The fact that these computers are using energy instead of being turned off or sleeping allows one to make the argument that it's environmentally irresponsible, but I'd have to see the data on the resources eaten up by large supercomputers to hash this out. There are worse things one could be destroying the environment in the name of anyways, like driving Hummers and transporting food over thousands of miles, so in the end it's worth it in my eyes. Additionally, one of the programs I run (which, incidentally, has the largest projects to download and thus uses the most time on my compy) does climate modeling in the hopes of better understanding global warming. So, the energy it uses is in the search for a solution to climate change, a quintessential carbon offset.
* The entire BOINC averages over 900 TFLOPS as of February 17, 2008.[2]
* SETI@Home computes data averages more than 265 TFLOPS.[3]
* Folding@Home has reached over 1 PFLOPS[4] as of September 15, 2007.[5] Note, as of March 22, 2007, PlayStation 3 owners may now participate in the Folding@home project. Because of this, Folding@home is now sustaining considerably higher than 210 TFLOPS (1267 TFLOPS as of September 23, 2007). See the current stats[6] for details.
* Einstein@Home is crunching more than 70 TFLOPS.[7]
* As of June 2007, GIMPS is sustaining 23 TFLOPS.[8]
* Intel Corporation has recently unveiled the experimental multi-core POLARIS chip, which achieves 1 TFLOPS at 3.2 GHz. The 80-core chip can increase this to 1.8 TFLOPS at 5.6 GHz, although the thermal dissipation at this frequency exceeds 260 watts.
I run BOINC all the time, and am a member of the folding@home and Einstein@home projects. This means my computer is part of a supercomputer, calculating protein folding and helping in the search for pulsars. Isn't that cool? Distributed computing is impressive because of how many resources it might save. Instead of building one huge supercomputer that does all of these operations, it's spread over thousands of computers around the world that would otherwise be doing nothing. The users lend their unused computing power to help understand our world better.
I got thinking about how this would impact the environment. The fact that these computers are using energy instead of being turned off or sleeping allows one to make the argument that it's environmentally irresponsible, but I'd have to see the data on the resources eaten up by large supercomputers to hash this out. There are worse things one could be destroying the environment in the name of anyways, like driving Hummers and transporting food over thousands of miles, so in the end it's worth it in my eyes. Additionally, one of the programs I run (which, incidentally, has the largest projects to download and thus uses the most time on my compy) does climate modeling in the hopes of better understanding global warming. So, the energy it uses is in the search for a solution to climate change, a quintessential carbon offset.
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