Here’s a lightened, cropped version of the lower image in the post below, showing no Sol-20 type clumps in the shadow, but clearly showing the ‘mystery blob.’
Re-reading a couple of MPL press releases makes me believe that additional digging was done in the trench pictured on Sol 19, resulting in the images of Sols 20 and 24, showing the now famous ‘disappearing clumps.’
There are also enough differences in the details of the trench itself to make it likely that additional digging explains the disappearance of the blob. But we had fun ‘digging’ through the images… photo courtesy NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona/ Texas A&M University…
Ice clumps on Mars? The recent announcement, first spotted on the MPL Twitter blog reports that the small grayish clumps visible in the lower left of the trench in the photo marked Sol 20 above, have disappeared by Sol 24, a discovery that is consistent with water ice sublimating into the thin, very dry Martian atmosphere.
My question is, what happened to the larger whitish clump visible in the picture, left, snapped on Sol 19, according to the MPL site. Stay tuned for some digital forensics on the Sol 19 image… photos courtesy NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona/ Texas A&M University…
This minor hack came along to Father’s Day brunch as a conversation piece, but I’m thinking, with the right security features, this might not be a bad idea. You could keep credit cards and other small personal documents in a special secure area, which docs would be able to send a special, encrypted ‘handshake’ at the point of use via WiFi or visual scan. Encryption and remote wipe make the phone – and your cards – useless if you lose it. Goodbye leather wallet… BTW, everybody reading this is now under NDA…
Linda and I are off (at 4:30 AM) to Milwaukee, of all places, tomorrow. Long story, but the Giants are playing the Brewers, I have an old college buddy there and a good friend from Chicago is coming up. I plan to use the travel time to think through a couple of very important projects.
One is to finally launch gulkerphotoarchive.com, an archive of my photo work. Another is to revive my copy of Userland Frontier/Radio, and tease all of my old columns for the Independent out of its database, so I can complete my literary archive on gulker.com.
We’re still thinking through the re-do of gulker.com World HQ, and a redesign of the blog. I’m still trying to decide if a MacBook Air is worth $1800, especially since I got the iPhone (which is a surprisingly useful ‘cloud computer’). And I continue to look at the tiny $400 Linux laptops from Asus and Everex. Decisions, decisions…
Newertech has announced a SATA/IDE/ATA to USB interface: you can plug your old hard (or CD or DVD) drive into your new computer and copy over data: alternately, you can recycle older drives for backup (Time Machine?) or other purposes. Some months ago I bought a no-brand USB to IDE interface at Fry’s, and used it to copy data from a box full of old HDs to a new, cheap ‘monster’ (500 GB) drive. It was pretty buggy on a Mac: I am presuming the Newertech unit is much more Mac friendly (and it has SATA).
The only thing lacking is a housing for the drives (though Newertech has a product Mac Mini aficionados will like): full-on geeks won’t mind, and those who favor solutions like my cheesy crate won’t either. Good item to keep in your geek drawer …
I somehow missed this Larry Magid report on Linux in the NYT last week. I think his conclusions are fair… LInux continues to give savvy users a viable, stable platform for most common computer chores, certainly for email, web-browsing et al. Where it may fall down is with issues like hooking up cameras, music players and installing and updating software, though those processes are improving. We have Ubuntu installed on our Mac Mini as a VM, just for fun…
by cg on September 27, 2007
First Blush has an almost painterly photo of water gushing from a Stanford culvert this morning. Which gets us to the topic of water, which was a really big deal at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in Davis last week.
Water is already in short supply in many parts of the world, and climate change has the potential to disrupt it even more, affecting large populations. I captured some of my thoughts about same in a not-quite 3-minute podcast, the first produced with the lashed together analog World HQ home audio studio (seen above). We need to find a way to keep the audio pieces hooked up for more rapid set up… maybe a new cheesy crate…?
by cg on September 23, 2007
The NYT’s Week in Review has a piece on Algorithms. It turns out the word ‘Algorithm’ comes from a corruption of the Latinized version of the name of the Baghdad scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, author of the Arabic treatise “On the Hindu Art of Reckoning†which introduced the decimal number system to the West in the 12th Century A.D.
The author sees ever more complex algorithms that encode human learning, and ever faster hardware, as blurring the man-machine divide. Will evolving algorithms beat AI to sentience? Hmmm…
by cg on September 22, 2007
So we put the Leica D2 on our lightweight Quantaray tripod, and caught this image, of moi at the Happy Hacker keyboard working the controls of World HQ. The inbox stack has shrunk, but much remains to be done, including improving our paperless office and better integrating GTD. Our whole backup strategy needs work, too.
Tank, seen at the controls of the Nebuchadnezzar, above left, in a still from the film ‘Matrix,’ epitomizes what we were trying to avoid: seemingly, there’s a CPU and screen for every system, and the operator has to figure it all out.
gulker.com HQ has lots of services folded into 2 screens, a server and 3 workstations. The system needs to be a bit more intuitive, and we need more automation for a number of features, like AM info downloads et al. Slowly getting the cyber side of ‘new life’ in order…
by cg on September 19, 2007
So, we have been determined to learn about podcasting, and the audio recording that goes along with the deal. We have just been too busy with the ‘new life’ (and dealing with spouse’s long lists of ‘to-dos’ now that she has a mate that she regards as otherwise not gainfully employed).
Anyway, yesterday we hooked up a USB microphone to our trusty laptop, equipped it with the Audacity open-source sound recording app (with LAME MP3 export libraries) and made a very simple podcast, basically just a recording of me blabbing about podcasting for a bit less than a minute. Next up, taking some DVR recordings and cutting tracks together…
