News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
Many of the ideas espoused by conservative Christian groups I find ridiculous and often repugnant. However there are also some ideas that fit perfectly with my thoughts. Please read this post and see if you agree, The Devil’s Bargain: Sweatshops and the American Scheme.
Tip o’ the hat to Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars
A comment over at Respectful Insolence led me to this post by Mike O’Risal and the Associated Press article that inspired it.
The AP article reports that:
Health departments around the country say traditional medicines used by many immigrants from Latin America, India and other parts of Asia are the second most common source of lead poisoning in the U.S. surpassed only by lead paint and may account for tens of thousands of such cases among children each year.
Dozens of adults and children have become gravely ill or died after taking lead-laden medicine over the past eight years, according to federal and local health officials.
Read the whole article for the details and remember, there are good reasons why the life expectancy of people is significantly higher in places that use modern, regulated, evidence based medicine.
Today we honor one of the greatest men of the 20th century, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I feel the best way to celebrate this day is to read some of his writings and listen to some of his speeches. Visit The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute to read some papers or see my previous post with selected quotes from the King papers, MLK Jr., Science, Darwin & Intelligent Design. GrrlScientist has posted two excellent MLK videos in honor of this holiday.
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): The Reason for this Holiday
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): I Have A Dream
James Watt was born on this day, January 19th, in 1736 at Greenock, Scotland. He was a mechanical engineer and inventor who’s steam engine was a key ingredient in the start of the Industrial Revolution. For this and his other contributions to science and technology the SI unit for power was named the watt in 1960. For more information check out the biographical reference links below. I think I’ll celebrate his birthday buy having a piece of PIE (sorry couldn’t resist the bad EE geek joke).
Biographies:
Wikipedia
James Watt by Andrew Carnegie
James Watt by Thomas H. Marshall
Birmingham Jewellery Quarter – More about James Watt
James Watt: Important Scots
BBC – History – James Watt
Watt letters collection at the Cornwall County Council
This report in the Michigan Daily highlights one of the next generation of illogical and irrational engineers. The article starts out with this gem.
Engineering senior Israel Vicars didn’t think it was a coincidence when he walked by a drunken girl who had fallen over in a parking lot and desperately needed help.
Vicars attributes his ability to safely return the girl to her residence hall to the power of united prayer.
OK so did the praying levitate the girl and allow him to lightly push the girl back to her home. If that happened then there’s be a million dollar prize waiting for Israel Vicars if he can demonstrate the effect. Prayer sometimes has a good effect on the psychological state of some people whom practice it. However, no prayer has ever been shown to do anything in the physical world. Instead people like this guy use confirmation bias to claim that something wasn’t a coincidence or random chance it was their prayers that did it.
With sloppy thinking like this I shudder to think how this guy is going to handle real world engineering problems. I sincerely hope Israel Vicars doesn’t work on engineering projects that will waste my tax dollars or lead to safety problems due to his magical thinking.
Hat tip to: Pharyngula: Let’s all pick on the University of Michigan!
Sumatra PDF viewer by Krzysztof Kowalczyk is an open source reader licensed with the GPL. This reader takes a minimalist approach that so far is working well for me.
I just finished watching part one of the NOVA episode “Absolute Zero” on PBS last week. Check your local listings to see if you can catch it on a re-broadcast or you can watch the program online. Part two will broadcast on most stations on Tuesday the 15th and will be online on the 16th.
Generally I found the program exceptionally good, it covers the history of scientific thinking about hot and cold very well as well as showing the commercial uses. I have only two criticisms and they are so small they are really nitpicking. The first is that the narrator as well as Professor Hasok Chang, author of “Inventing Temperature, Measurement and Scientific Progress”, both use the obsolete units name centigrade. It probably just bugs me because I can still remember losing grade points in Mrs. Wolfs’ chemistry class for using centigrade instead of Celsius. The other criticism is the lack of clarity when in the part on Clarence Birdseye the narrator says, “temperature forty degrees below freezing”. I had to pause the playback and think for a minute wether they meant Celsius or Fahrenheit. My first thought was that they meant -40°C which equals -40°F but then I remembered that household freezers are around 0°F so, I think they meant -8°F (-22°C).
I encourage everyone to watch this fine program and please support your local PBS station so, they can keep bringing us the best science show evah, NOVA.
According to the Netscape Blog, on February 1st support for Netscape Navigator ends. I switched my primary browser from Mosaic to Netscape in 1995 and used it almost exclusively up until Internet Explorer 5.0’s release in 1999. Although I have rarely used any of the Netscape versions since Phoenix (1st version of Firefox) came out in 2002, I still think it’s a bit sad that the Granddad of the Mozilla/Firefox/SeaMonkey lineage is gone.
Hat tip to John at Stranger Fruit
Conformity Magazine pointed me to this December 4th notice from the FCC. The commission would like to eliminate the automatic expiration for the Do Not Call registry. I think every US citizen who is not employed in the telemarketing industry would like this rule change to go through.
The statement of Chairman Kevin J. Martin sums up the commission’s decision:
Todays action tentatively concludes that telephone numbers registered in the National Do-Not- Call Registry will not expire after 5 years. The Commission continues to move forward to protect consumers who have registered their telephone numbers on the Do-Not-Call list. Consumers expect their telephone numbers to remain protected under the Do-Not-Call list until they have cancelled their registration or their telephone number is disconnected or reassigned.
My regular reader 😉 may remember that I’ve recommended Instant Media (I’M) as an alternative to Joost in previous posts. Over the last 6 months or so I basically only used it for automatic downloading of DL.TV and Cranky Geeks (linked under Netcasts on the right). While I had noticed that the I’M guide wasn’t working back in September I hadn’t bothered to find out why. This week I looked around and found some information in these blog posts.
Instant Media Gone Bust? Feeling the Web Video Bubble Burst
Instant Media, Miro Competitor, Leaves The Net Without A Trace
Instant Media Grinds to a Halt
Those posts speculate on what happened and the last one linked above does have a fairly definitive answer from one the the former developers.
Scott Blum, the eccentric billionaire that was funding our company, decided to scuttle it mid-July
This was a little puzzling, why did the I’M web site stay online until September when the plug had been pulled in July. This blog post gives me an idea of why, the company tried to sue Microsoft and get a preliminary injunction over Microsoft’s use of their trademark, I’M. That seems like the reason to me, I’M had to stay up on the web until the court decided, once the courts ruled against I’M in the middle of August I’M had no further incentive to stay around.
Since I’M was gone I decided to look around for an alternative and I found a great one, Miro. This is an excellent program especially since it’s open source and cross platform. I installed it on my OpenSuse 10.3 PC and setup a Samba share so that my Media Center PC can play the videos. One feature I hope to make good use of once NerdTV starts season two is Miro’s support for Bittorrent. I like the idea of be able to easily to give some of my bandwidth to NerdTV to help defray the distribution costs (PBS doesn’t have very deep pockets).
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 