Gray Watson's Blog -- February 2007

I've found that blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often.

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February 28, 2007   

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development's "Annual" Homeless Assessment Report to Congress (not compiled since 1984) lists that there are 750,000 homeless in the United States (local copy). I though Reagan said there were none!? What a travesty.
  • 47% of all sheltered homeless people are single adult men living in shelters.
  • 59% of the sheltered homeless population are members of minority groups.
  • African-Americans constitute 45% of people who are homeless.
  • Nearly 25% of all sheltered homeless persons are age 17 or younger.
  • 25% of all sheltered homeless adults are disabled.

February 27, 2007   

• A Russian rocket's 2nd stage malfunctioned on the 19th, exploding in space and releasing 1,000 pieces of orbiting debris which could threaten other spacecraft. Most stages are designed to dump fuel before falling back into the atmosphere and burning up but multiple failures aboard the Proton rocket which caused the destruction of its satellite cargo as well caused the 2nd stage's fuel to detonate in space.

  Esa officials estimate that the risk of a mission critical collision between debris from the Breeze-M stage and the ISS has been raised by 10%. But unlike the orbiting detritus from the Chinese test, the debris from this event is likely to remain in orbit for years.

  "The closest point to Earth is maintained [by the debris] at a fairly constant altitude for a long, long time," Heiner Klinkrad, head of Esa's orbital debris office told BBC News.

• I was watching a program on the Tenerife airplane disaster last night. It happened in 1977 when a fully loaded KLM 747 struck a Pan Am 747 during takeoff killing 583 people. I remember it happening. Although there were (and always are) a myriad of environmental and other factors, human error, especially those of the captain and the crew of the KLM 747, was mostly to blame. The cockpit voice recorder clearly shows that the 3rd officer was questioning the captain of the KLM asking if the Pan Am jet was out of its way as the plane accelerated towards disaster. Very tragic. Other sources: NOVA, PanAm.

  Immediately after lining up, the KLM captain powered up the 747 to take off; however, the co-pilot advised the captain that ATC clearance had not been given and takeoff was aborted instantly. The KLM crew then received an ATC airways clearance; a clearance to fly a certain route after take-off, but not permission for the take-off itself. The captain may have mistaken this for a take-off clearance. He released the brakes of the aircraft and the co-pilot responded with a heavy Dutch accent with words that could either be "We are at take off" or "We are taking off". The control tower was confused by the message and asked for the KLM plane to stand by. However, simultaneous communication from Pan Am caused mutual interference. All that was audible was a heterodyne beat tone, making the tower response inaudible to the pilots. Coincidentally, Pan Am was reporting they had not finished taxiing. Either message, if broadcast separately, might have given KLM crew time to abort its takeoff.

• The Bush administration hosts an electric car showcase. Although this is mostly window dressing, good for them. After years of talking about Hybrids or Hyrdrogen, the Bush administration is recognizing the place that electric cars have in our [near] future. But now they need to step up to the plate and actually set tough CAFE standards and push for more things than ethanol and bio-diesel which sells well to the farm conglomerates but are at best moderately sustainable. Other sources: EV World.

  White House aides said the sharp increase in alternative fuels and technological changes, including the use of more gas-electric hybrid cars, will cut projected gasoline demand by 20 percent over the next decade.

  "We're going to be driving our cars using all kinds of different fuels other than gasoline, and using batteries that will be able to be recharged in vehicles that don't have to look like golf carts," Bush said after meeting with business leaders and scientists who believe there is a market for automobiles that use high-tech batteries.

February 26, 2007   

• Here's a good site with wind turbine parts including generators, blades, towers, etc.. Also a lot of survival equipment which I'm less interested in.

  If you are building a new system we highly recommend a 24v system if you want a battery back-up or Off-Grid system. If you are strictly building a grid tie system with battery backup, build a 48v battery system since converting 48v to 110v is more efficient, and wire size is half the size of 24v. Not sure? Go 24v. Or, you really only want Grid-Tie and will maybe buy 24 Volt appliances in the future, then go with a 48v system and when you get the 24v appliances also buy a DC to DC converter to go from 48v to 24v. If you stay with the same battery voltage then you won't loose 10% of your power through a converter. Note: DC Appliances use much less energy than AC. Also, you will loose about 10% of your produced power just going through a "high quality home" inverter and more with a cheap one. Stay 24v and you will loose no power through inverters and converters!

• Fascinating work entitled Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population by the Google labs guys. Basically they took a number of factors (temperature, SMART data, usage information, replacement rates) to try and come up with predictive models of drive failures. Sounds like they were not completely successful but a lot of good data resulted -- some of which directly contradicts other published reports which most likely are extrapolating from manufacturer data.
  • Correlating drive failure rates with average temperature levels (15-50C or 59-122F) showed that drives running cooler (15-25C or 59-77F) have higher failure rates than hotter (26C-50C or 78-122F). Wild!
  • They found a lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for drives at higher utilization levels although their measure of utilization was not very exact.
  • Some (but not all) of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities but 36% of all failed drives had no SMART errors.

  Here's another drive failure study put together by CMU researchers. The results, although much harder to extract, seem to match well with google's findings.

  Pinheiro et al. analyze disk replacement data from a large population of serial and parallel ATA drives. They report ARR values ranging from 1.7% to 8.6%, which agrees with our results. The focus of their study is on the correlation between various system parameters and drive failures. They find that while temperature and utilization exhibit much less correlation with failures than expected, the value of several SMART counters correlate highly with failures. For example, they report that after a scrub error drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scrub errors and that 44% of all failed drives had increased SMART counts in at least one of four specific counters.

• So Ro and I would buy a Prius plugin kit if it were available. I would also buy an electric car if one that was Boston road worthy was available for less than $40k but that's a different blog entry. So here are some links about plugin hybrid kits for the Prius.
  • Hymotion's Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Prius kit. Unfortunately not available right now.
  • News release about Hymotion's kit: Soultex, Green Car Congress
  • EV World's when can I buy one article.
  • CNet article about plugin hybrids.

February 22, 2007   

• I've been meaning to blog this for 2 months. I must admit that I am impressed with the Republicans professionalism during the power handover. I cannot say that I believe that the Democrats would have been so magnanimous. It hasn't lasted but who expected it to.

  This latest landslide is different. The losers seem to believe they got what was coming to them. In Washington, leaving aside those legislators and staff members whose oxen have been gored most directly, there is little discontent. You can sit at a table full of Republican journalists and consultants and hear them describe feelings ranging from "relieved" to "giddy." You might reasonably assume that this reaction is more pronounced the farther you get from Washington. What makes the country so unanimously content with its new leaders?

  Perhaps it's an expectation that Democrats are going to take the country in some excellent new direction. The United States is probably going to become more isolationist (the fallout from Iraq) and more protectionist (the message that most distinguishes this crop of legislators from its predecessors). But beyond that, voters have only the vaguest idea what the Democrats in Congress stand for. A November Gallup poll found that a third of them had never heard of the Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid.

• Not sure I blogged this before, but here is a piece debunking some of the 9/11 myths that I contributed to. I have a source who was on Flight 1989 which the skeptics say was made to disappear.

  Evidence For: At 11:43 a.m. the morning of 9/11, the following Associated Press news bulletin appeared on the Web site for Cincinnati ABC affiliate station WCPO, Channel 9: "A Boeing 767 out of Boston made an emergency landing Tuesday at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport due to concerns that it may have a bomb aboard, said Mayor Michael R. White. White said the plane had been moved to a secure area of the airport, and was evacuated. United identified the plane as Flight 93."

  This lone article remains a holy grail of sorts for Jason Bermas and his filmmaking buddies. The 26-year-old Bermas was a graphic designer in upstate New York before he began researching 9/11 for the documentary Loose Change. Sales of the 90-minute DVD have been so brisk that Bermas quit his day job. There's talk of submitting to Sundance, but in the meantime Bermas and director Dylan Avery, 22, are busy scheduling interviews with CNN and newspapers across the planet for the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

• So I went to the eye doctor and paid US$30 to get high-res scans of my retinas. They recommended it and the cost wasn't too bad. In the process I got the following images. Pretty cool.
     

February 20, 2007   

• So Venture Vehicles VentureOne has been announced. It is a 1,200 pound 2 seater much like an enclosed motorcycle but with an tilting front compartment. It is really an elecitric vehicle with a 3 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack charged via plug-in or via the onboard small gasoline motor driving a 15 kilowatt generator. Very exciting. They are promising a ~US$20k price tag and an expected launch date of "July 2008". Other sources: Daily Tech, Gizmag, Autobloggreen, Green Car Congress.

  The VentureOne weighs approximately 1,200 pounds in prototype form, with an overall width of 48 inches, a length of 11' 8", and a 106 inch wheelbase. The engine is located in the rear of the vehicle at a low height. The passenger compartment and the front wheel tilt when cornering; however, the forces are aligned with the vertical axis of the driver's body, resulting in the driver being pressed into the seat rather than pushed across it.

  Although classified as a motorcycle according to the NHTSA (since it has three wheels), the VentureOne has an enclosed body. The reinforced roll-cage construction in combination with front-and-side-impact protection, and a highly efficient passenger restraint system, give the occupants a level of protection comparable to conventional cars -- or statistically, 33 times the safety of a typical motorcycle.

February 13, 2007   

• NASA is preparing it's new space telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope due to be launched in 2013. The main mirror consists of 18 hexagonal elements which can be individually targeted and will be 2.5 times larger than Hubble's. Other sources: NASA, Wikipedia.
  • JWST is named after James E Webb, Nasa Administrator during the Apollo lunar exploration era; he served from 1961 to 1968
  • It will be placed 1.5m km from Earth, at Lagrange Point 2, an area of gravitational balance that keeps it in a Sun-Earth line
  • The telescope will be shaded from sunlight by a shield, enabling it to stay cold, increasing its sensitivity to infrared radiation
  • Three principal instruments will gather images of the Universe in the infrared region of the spectrum
  • These will yield new information about how stars and galaxies first formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang

February 5, 2007   

• Just started an interesting page about a problem we are having with a JAVA with Bad file descriptor exceptions. After first assuming that it was a code bug, we are now thinking that it is a Linux / JDK issue after extensive code reviews of our JAVA, the JDK, the native code, and the kernel. The underlying problem may be that if the close() syscall returns -1, the JDK throws an error without setting the FileDescriptor to -1. This can cause the finalizer to double close a FileDescriptor, either generating an EBADF or closing another descriptor inadvertently. This problem was not in Sun's 1.4 JDK, is in 1.5 through 1.5.11, and is in 1.6.
• Pluto spacecraft New Horizons is preparing to sling-shot around Jupiter at the end of the month (closest approach to Jupliter on 2/28/2007). New Horizons is designed to be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto, recently downgraded from full planet status to a Kuiper Belt object. It was launched on 1/19/2006 by the Atlas V 551 rocket which is able to get 8672 kg to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). The spacecraft was traveling 16.21 km/second (36,300 mph) just after its last engine shut down, making it the fastest spacecraft launch ever. As an aside, the spacecraft is carrying a piece of SpaceShipOne as a memento.
• Disturbing article talking about the plethora of government contractors that are at work alongside many federal employees. The article states that competition for contracts is often slim to none and the oversight of the projects is minimal -- often outsourced itself to contractors.

  Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about US$400 billion last year from US$207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

  Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government. Even the governments online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced (and is famously difficult to use).

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