Recently in Technology Category

If this technology pans out, incandescent light bulbs could end up being as efficient or even more efficient than CFLs or LEDs.

Don't dump those incandescents for CFLs or LEDs just yet.

It looks like it's a video night tonight, with this great piece by comedian Louis CK on Conan.

What makes it so good is its truth, that being that people today are too darned spoiled. They take today's technology for granted, either forgetting or being too young to have ever experienced what it was like before cell phones, ATMs, the Internet, and cheap airline fares.


I know I'm dating myself here, but I remember doing all the things he talks about in regards to how everyone used to do things. Of them all, dialing the phone was probably the most annoying. And back then we did actually dial the number, not like now where all we have to do is punch some buttons or, if your phone is fancy enough, merely say "Call Mom" and the phone automatically calls your mom.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

While looking for blog fodder I came across a number of interesting videos. Some of you may have already seen them. Some of you haven't. It doesn't matter since they because they're good enough to see more than once.

First, there's this from Arizona Governor Brewer, calling President Obama on the carpet for his failure to fulfill one of his primary duties as president: Protecting our borders.


Then there's this, made by an unknown author, that brings the problems with the 111^th Congress and the President into focus. Some have called it a new Republican campaign ad. I think it's a warning to those in power that we, the American people, are not to be trifled with, condescended to, or ignored.


America will indeed rise on November 2, 2010. We "shall not go quietly into that goodnight."

Last, but not least, is this video from Penn & Teller's cable show, calling "Bulls**t!" about health food and the scare tactics used by shallow, holier-than-thou racists willing to let millions upon millions starve to death just so they can feel good about eating expensive organically grown, not-available-to-the-Third-World food. (Sorry, you'll have to follow the link as I couldn't find any embed code to add it here.)

First, we had to worry about computer crackers going after our machines at work and home. Then, they went after our PDAs. Then our smart phones. Now we have to worry about them going after our cars.

At least my son doesn't have to worry about computer crackers going after his totally uncomputerized 1975 Jeep CJ5.

Is it any wonder 'green' jobs haven't been created here?

With the US government spending far too much time trying to kill off traditional energy sources, they really haven't spent nearly as much time trying to promote production of green energy sources as they should. Could that be why a lot of potential American energy jobs have been heading to China instead?

It seems any time there are alternative energy projects that actually look like they may actually work as advertised, the government wants nothing to do with it, or worse, works to kill them. But they'll sink tons of money into questionable projects with little chance of return on investment, or that will require endless government subsidies to survive.

Despite the ABC report above that the government of China controls the economy from top to bottom, meaning they can make offers others can't, the reality is quite different.

According to report from Cornell University, China's free enterprise economy works from the bottom up.

Entrepreneurship is taking off in China and with little input from the government, reports a new Cornell study. It is the capitalism of the private sector -- not government -- that is powering China's huge economy, say the researchers, making the rise of capitalism in China very similar to the West's.

"The surprising finding is how little government actually is needed to enable entrepreneurial activities," said Victor Nee, Goldwin Smith professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell, who led the study. "Where markets rule, profit opportunities naturally draw in new entrepreneurs, no matter how adverse the institutional environment may be initially. Once a critical mass of private firms operates in specific niches, social norms and networks fulfill many of the functions that textbook economics assigns to government and legal institutions."

So ABC says one thing, and a study from Cornell says just the opposite. Who am I willing to believe?

Cornell, of course.

Chinese entrepreneurship is echoing that of the US long ago. Entrepreneurship is an endangered species here in America, seeing that the government doesn't appear interested in keeping US innovation, ideas, and inventions here where they can create new jobs, if not entirely new industries. We are indeed becoming far too much like Europe, where the government has taken control of many aspects of the economy. They stifle innovation, either by making financing new ventures more difficult or less profitable, or burying them under an avalanche of regulations that all but prohibit new economic activity unless the government can exercise control over every aspect of it.

Is it any wonder US companies are finding China far more receptive to new ideas and new technologies than the US?

I knew the iPad was supposed to be like magic, but I never thought the 'magic' was literal!

One thing that has always bothered me about the folks in Congress is their incredible ignorance and arrogance when it comes to technology and science. Very few members of Congress have the background or expertise to make law or policy on science and technology matters. Far too often they get it wrong, meaning the nation and the economy suffer for it. After all, what do they know?

The answer, in a word, is obvious: they know pretty much nothing. What's worse is that they don't feel that ignorance should preclude them from talking until there is an initial technical investigation, done by some technically qualified people (from various reputable organizations). (We saw this same rush to judgment by the know-nothings after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986.)

To me, all this is just another manifestation of the sad, ironic reality that engineers have made the incredibly difficult look way too easy. Everyone thinks it's all no big deal and not very hard, so it's easy to be an expert. It's happened in nearly all engineering and scientific disciplines.

People in general have little or no understanding of the technology they use every day, but at least they know they don't understand it and are willing to admit they don't understand it. All they know is that they can use it. Unfortunately Congress doesn't know that they don't know, and that's the problem. This false belief means they will, more often than not, come to the wrong conclusions about some scientific or technological issue. It also means that the rest of us will pay the price for their decisions, one way or another.

I'm not saying that Congress shouldn't get involved with such issues. But they should be more willing to take the time to learn about them well before deciding anything. There are very few science or technology issues that require immediate action by Congress. Unfortunately Congress doesn't realize this, or worse, they don't care. It's all about posturing and politics and power and not about the actual issues.

OK, dear readers, how many of you out there are still using Internet Explorer 6? If you are, why?

IE6 has to be the most targeted web browser for hacker exploits, even with the security patches provided by Microsoft. If you're still using it, it's time for a change. Just about any modern browser will be more secure than IE6.

We here at The Manse use Firefox 3.6.3 and we update it as soon as new updates are available. Microsoft has IE8. There's Opera, Chrome, Safari, and a whole host of other browsers out there. Pick one, try it, and if you don't like it, try another one. But get rid of IE6 now.

Note: For full disclosure, at work we use both Firefox and IE6. The decision about IE6 is not ours, but that of our corporate IT folks. About the only thing we (meaning Engineering) use it for is some internal applications (Oracle, Microsoft Project Web Access, and one or two other corporate applications), but never for URLs outside the corporate proxy server.

Like any bit of software, there are times when updates or upgrades can cause far more problems than they were meant to fix. Sometimes the new problems are minor in scope and very few users will notice them. Other times the new problems will bring a computer system to its knees.

Such was the case with a recent update pushed out by the the folks at McAfee, the anti-virus software company.

Many companies and people on Thursday [April 21] were fixing thousands of Windows PCs that went haywire as a result of a seriously flawed software update sent by antivirus vendor McAfee.

The update distributed at 3 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday misclassified a critical Windows XP system file, called svchost.exe, as a malicious program. As a result, McAfee's AV software was instructed to detect and remove the threat, sending affected PCs into fits of rebooting that made the machines useless.

Um...Oops?

Fortunately my recently resurrected main computer was still off-line when the accidentally malicious software update was released, so it did not suffer the fate of so many other XP machines. (A note: my main computer also runs Linux, thank goodness). None of the other machines here at The Manse use McAfee (Deb's computer uses AVG and the other computers, which run Linux, use ClamAV).

Being an engineer and a long time amateur radio operator I have always liked seeing an interesting innovation used to fix a problem, whether the fix is temporary or permanent. I've used unorthodox fixes in both my vocation and avocation over the years. It's also fun seeing how others have dealt with solving problems with only the materials they had on hand.

That being said, I found a blog devoted entirely to showing interesting jury-rigged fixes to everyday problems.

(A big thanks to Eric the Viking)

This is a follow up to this post, specifically to the second half of the post.

A recap:

A laser source is received from a customer for repair, wrapped in a note that says "Toggle switch on top panel of unit is broken off. Can't turn on unit power."

The problem was immediately apparent to our faithful Repair Guy.

The toggle switch was indeed gone...because the unit in question never had one.

The power switch on the unit in question is on the front, a red circle with a vertical line in the center. The user's manual even shows a diagram of where the switch is located and what it looks like.

Today, our Repair Guy received an irate phone call from the same customer, demanding to know why his laser source wasn't repaired.

Our Repair Guy tried to explain to the customer why the unit didn't require repair, but the customer wasn't having it. So he asked the customer if he had the carrying case for the laser. When the customer answered that he did, the Repair Guy asked him to go into the case pocket and remove the piece of paper inside, then read it over the phone.

"The previous model DWLS2, discontinued over 7 years ago, did use a toggle switch on the top panel to turn on the power to the unit and select the laser wavelength."

"The present DWLS2 does not incorporate a toggle switch. Instead, there is a keypad on the front panel. The round red button on the lower left corner of the keypad is the power switch. Press and hold the button for 2 seconds until the indicator LEDs turn on. Press and hold the button again for 2 seconds to turn the unit off."

"For further information please Read The Fine Manual, enclosed."

Then the customer actually pushed the power button, turning on the laser...

...and then hung up his phone.

No "Thank you". No "Oops." No nothing, other than the sound of the call being disconnected. Our Repair Guy doesn't know if it was due to anger, embarrassment, or a fit of pique.

This incident proves that our Repair Guy understands our customers quite well and anticipates their needs, hence the piece of paper he included with the laser source when he shipped it back to the customer.

I would have posted this next Tuesday, but it was too good to wait until then. So I bring you two more tales from the files of Tech Support.

The first tale of tech support woe came to my attention earlier today when I received a request to look into a customer complaint about two red laser sources that apparently failed after the customer had used them for about a week. Two laser sources were being returned because there was no visible output even though both of the indicator LEDs were on...one of them being the Low Battery indicator.

This indicator lets the customer know the batteries need to be replaced. If the customer had actually read the instruction manual he would have known that when the Low Battery LED is on, the red laser is disabled. So the customer sent his two red laser sources all the way back to our factory from overseas to have the AA alkaline batteries changed.

The second tale is related to the first.

While talking to our Repair Guy about the first incident, he mentioned that it isn't all that unusual for him to receive units for repair that required only a change of batteries to set them to rights. For certain pieces of equipment about 25% of the returns required only new batteries to 'fix' them. Some of this equipment still had the original batteries shipped with them many years ago.

These two tales prove what we've known for a long time: Customers don't read the user manuals. And as long as this is true we will continue to see 'broken' units that aren't really broken and only need new batteries.

Over the past few years the functionality of cell phones has grown to the point that there are so many functions built in that they rival many home computers in regards to the types and numbers of software applications they can run. They can act as organizers, send and receive e-mail, surf the web, text message, take pictures, record video and audio, play music, play games, give turn by turn directions, and perform a host of other tasks. But one thing they don't always do so well is make phone calls, something customers want them to be able to do.

Over 1,300 survey respondents were asked the open ended question, "What features are desired on your next phone?" The top three responses were better connectivity, better audio and simplicity.

In many cases vendors have been so focused on making complex camera phones, music phones or mobile Internet devices, they have lost sight of the fact that phone functionality is mediocre at best. How often have we seen someone with a finger in one ear and a cellphone pressed to the other ear, desperately trying to hear a conversation? Our survey responses suggest that there is an opportunity for vendors to develop phones with great audio quality, robust connectivity and antenna features that are simply easy to use.

I know there are times when I am not pleased with the quality of the connection and audio on my cell phone. It isn't a problem with drop outs that I find the most vexing, but the poor quality of the transmit and receive audio. It would be nice to have what is called toll-quality audio when I'm using my cell phone rather than the variable and consistently poor quality I deal with now.

It is laudable when individuals or businesses deploy alternative energy generation systems, be they small or large. It's great...as long as they work.

In Minnesota, the Minnesota Municipal Power Authority erected 11 wind turbines in a number of cities around Minneapolis/St. Paul this past fall. The plan was to have all of them up and running by Christmas. The turbines were refurbished units originally used at a California wind farm. After reconditioning they were shipped from California to Minnesota and erected.

In southern California it's warm, even in winter. In Minnesota, it's cold from late fall through spring. In fact it's more than just cold, it's freakin' cold. Apparently the folks in California weren't aware of this fact.

The turbines sit idly in Anoka, North St. Paul, Chaska, Shakopee, Buffalo and six other cities, all members of the Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (MMPA). The refurbished, 115-foot towers had operated on a California wind farm, where they didn't have to worry about cold hydraulic fluid turning to gel and oil lubricants getting too sluggish.

Fluids and lubricants that worked well in California didn't work at all in below freezing temperatures, gumming up the works and bringing the turbines to a halt until spring. That turned them into expensive monuments to facts overlooked.

Oops.

First it was wired microphones planted in rooms to listen to what the occupants were saying. Then it was radio bugs or shotgun mikes to eavesdrop on conversations. After that it was a laser beam aimed at a window record the vibrations of the glass caused by people inside of a room talking.

And now they use just the laser beam itself to listen to distant conversations. Such a system will be able to listen to your heart beating even from a distance.

Some technically savvy people know that light can be used as a tool for eavesdropping: if a beam from one arm of an optical interferometer is reflected off a window, the interferometer can sense sounds--including human voices--that make the window vibrate. But not only is it hard to separate voices from other sounds sensed by the interferometer; the setup must also be very precise, and in many cases there is no window conveniently nearby.

Researchers from Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan, Israel) and the Universitat de València (Burjassot, Spain) have developed a different way to sense sound remotely--one that doesn't rely on either an interferometer or a window. Instead, a single laser beam is shone on the object to be monitored (for example, a human or a cellphone) and the speckles that appear in an out-of-focus image of the object are tracked, producing information from which a spectrogram or temporal sound signal can be constructed.

Unlike the development system described in the article, future systems won't need to use a visible laser beam to perform their magic. Instead they will use an infrared laser, invisible to the eye (but not the camera).

Am I worried about the government listening in on my conversations? No. Well, maybe. Kinda. Oh, heck, yeah I am. But what concerns me even more is ordinary people listening in on their friends, neighbors, and adversaries. The phrase "out of earshot" could become meaningless.

I'm not sure I'm ready for anyone desiring to do so becoming privy to my private conversations. I doubt you are either.

But still, it's neat technology.

There have been plenty of times throughout our lives when we've done something we thought was a good idea that, in the end, had some unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences have been good, sometimes neutral, and far too many times bad to varying degrees.

We see this all the time when it comes to laws, budgets (personal and public both), relationships, and a whole host of other areas too numerous to list.

And so it also happens with new energy saving technology.

I doubt anyone out there reading this hasn't seen the LED traffic signals that are seemingly ubiquitous these days. It makes sense for municipalities to use them in place of the old incandescent lights because they use a fraction of the electricity of the old lights. The LED traffic lights also last longer than the incandescent lights, meaning less maintenance is required because they don't need to be replaced very often. These two factors save towns and cities lots of money, both in energy and labor. But there's also a downside that didn't become apparent until this winter.

They don't produce enough heat to melt the snow which can block the traffic signal's red, yellow, and green lights.

"We had a snow storm here [in Utah] that got piled into some of the exterior traffic light shields.  These lights use LEDs. Not long ago, the traffic lights used 60-W incandescent lamps that gave off enough heat to melt any snow that blocked the colored lenses. I guess the LEDs just don't generate enough heat. An unintended consequence of using LEDs, at least in areas that get snow."

Oops.

About a year ago I wrote a rant about something that has always peeved me, that being the highly variable volume between within TV shows and between TV shows and commercials. The swing in volume can be dramatic and, far too often, demands constant attention to the volume which in turn requires us to keep the remote handy at all times.

You're watching a show you like, but at times the dialog has very low volume. You can barely hear a word anyone is saying. You turn up the volume on the TV so you can hear the dialog. Then a scene changes or a commercial break comes up and suddenly IT'S THIS LOUD!!

You scramble to turn the volume down to a dull roar. The action scene or commercial break ends and now you can't hear the dialog...again. It's a never ending cycle.

For me it's worse in the late evening when BeezleBub or Deb are trying to get to sleep. I have to stay right on top of the remote to chop back the volume every time it comes booming out of the speakers. It becomes tiresome.

I have a couple of questions for the various TV and cable networks: Why the hell do you jerks do this? Do you really think it makes your shows that much more watchable or your sponsor's commercials more likely to sell their product?

Let me clue you in - It doesn't. All it does is piss us off.

With the state of the art what it is when it comes to sound engineering you'd think the TV and movie folks would be able to keep the difference between the softest and loudest sounds a bit narrower than they do now (that's what's called dynamic range).

That battle has not ended, meaning we spend more time turning the volume up and down to keep it at a reasonable level than we do actually watching the show.

But now a solution to the problem may be at hand.

Loud commercials have always been an annoyance to TV viewers, but this is the first time a concerted industry effort has led to a positive outcome.

The work of the experts has been published as "ATSC Recommended Practice A/85: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television." You can download this document for free at www.atsc.org.

In concept, it's simple. Measure the loudness of a typical segment of dialogue in a program and assign that value as the dialnorm of the program. Measure the average loudness across an entire commercial and assign that as the dialnorm value of the commercial. When you insert the commercial (which is now a digital file) into the program, if the dialnorm value of the commercial is not equal to the dialnorm of the program, apply an overall gain correction to modify the commercial's dialnorm value to make it equal to that of the program.

In effect, that means that commercials will no longer be a lot louder than the TV shows the merchants are sponsoring, but only if the bill laying out these requirements, H.R 1084, actually passes in the House. If it passes we won't have to constantly adjust the volume to keep from going deaf!

I pondered about what to write tonight, but there were far too many things that would be great blog fodder for the sharp wit (OK, semi-dull wit) of yours truly. Well, not really. Frankly, I got nothing that prompts me to write anything worthwhile tonight. I really didn't want to have no entry at all, so I pondered even more. Then it came to me in a flash:

What would it be like if wireless phone technology didn't exist?

A stroke of genius, I must say. There's even a video to help you imagine just such a thing! (OK, I shamelessly stole it from Texas Instruments, but it does get the point across.)



So the next time you pick up your cell phone, Blackberry, or iPod, or fire up your 52" LCD HDTV, remember to thank an engineer. We may be socially inept and not all that great with members of the opposite sex, but we actually rule the world. You just don't know it yet.

No! Say it ain't so!!!

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, says that Linux is now becoming bloated, much like Windows.

Sometimes success has a down side.

One of the long standing arguments against the use of nuclear power has about what to do about the spent fuel, also called nuclear waste. For many years those against nuclear power have made the claim that the large amounts of waste were dangerous and there was no place safe to store it or sequester it for the time required to ensure it was safe. (Plutonium, one of the byproducts of fission, has a half-life of 25,000 years.) People argued the waste could be stolen by terrorists to make a nuclear weapon.

They were wrong.

The issue of nuclear waste is political, not technological.

First, we should look at exactly what is actually being argued about.

After fuel rods have spent a few years inside a nuclear reactor producing energy, they are removed from the reactor and placed in a cooling pool, held there until they have cooled to the point where they can be removed and placed into storage casks. 'Spent' fuel rods have used only a moderate percentage of the recoverable energy in the fissionable fraction of uranium that makes up the fuel. Each fuel rod assembly contains two different isotopes of uranium: U₂₃₅, the fissionable isotope, and U₂₃₈ which is not fissionable. The amount of U₂₃₅ versus U₂₃₈ is about 3% to 97%, meaning U₂₃₅ makes up only 3% of the uranium in the assembly. After being used in the power reactor that ratio has changed, with the fraction of U₂₃₅ being smaller, as is also the case of the U₂₃₈. But now there's also a fraction of Pu₂₃₉, or plutonium, as well as a few other radioisotopes.

At this point the spent fuel is supposed to be stored away someplace 'safe' for the next 25,000 years, something that really isn't practical. But that's what we're supposed to be doing with it. At this point it's considered waste. But is it really?

So is this material "waste"? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.

Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 -- which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.

What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.

So why aren't we doing likewise?

Politics.

We have the means to reprocess fuel, which in the process would reduce the total volume of spent fuel tremendously. Instead we put it in storage casks and in cooling pools because of a decision made back in 1975 by President Gerald Ford to stop fuel reprocessing. His executive order was issued because of the fear terrorist would steal the spent fuel and make a bomb. Ford's successor made the order permanent, which is surprising considering President Carter had been a nuclear engineer in the US Navy.

If anyone has ever seen how fuel is stored and how it's transported, those fears would be greatly reduced. Moving that stuff isn't easy, isn't fast, and would be very difficult to steal (and not because of the security but because of the sheer size of the transport casks). If terrorists want nuclear weapons it's easier for them get it from a renegade regime or buy it on the arms market. It's not likely they'd be able to process the fuel themselves in their garage or basement and turn it into weapons grade material.

When all is said and done, the amount of energy it's possible to generate using nuclear power is incredible, Wen one takes into account the total energy cycle, meaning the amount of carbon dioxide created for the planning, construction, commissioning, operation, and eventual decommissioning and dismantling of a nuclear power plant versus alternative energy sources, meaning solar and wind, nuclear is far greener. Nuclear power is such a dense energy source, generating far more electricity than any wind farm or solar farm while taking up a small fraction of the space of either of those alternatives.

Continued in Part III - Nuclear power and green energy 'sprawl'.