Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

Film’s Last (Hawaii) Hurrah

Apr 3rd, 2010

The camera gremlins were hard at work prior to our recent Hawaii vacation. Both of my working digital cameras were stolen at the Denver dog show in February. I do intend to get another Canon mid-size eventually, probably the G11, but in shopping for new pocket units I found that Best Buy had no Kodaks, and (worse) every damned pocket camera they sold requires that the battery be removed for recharging. The chap there had no idea why this was so, and I still don’t have a good explanation. But that’s idiotic, especially if (as I suspect) it was done to save a quarter’s worth of interior parts in a $500 camera.

My 2005-vintage Kodak V530 pocket camera had both a charger dock and a wall-wart, and the battery never needs to emerge from the camera until you carry it out in its coffin. Alas, the whole camera got carried out in its coffin last fall. My solution was to find a used or (hopefully) NOS Kodak V530 on eBay, and while I looked, I didn’t nail one until just last night, and that didn’t help us with Hawaii. Carol has a Kodak digital camera, but we’ve lost the portable charger, and the only way to recharge it is using her printer dock, which isn’t designed for lugging around.

So about all we could do was dig Carol’s 2001-era Kodak Advantix film camera out of the junk cabinet to see if it still lived. And mirabile dictu! The little CR2 3V battery wasn’t even dead, after not having been used for at least six years.

Wow.

We put a new battery in it anyway, and it handled the bulk of the photography on our Hawaii adventure. (We bought an underwater film camera for our very corkybobby snorkel trip.) Walgreens no longer has Kodak machines, but Target does, and we got the pictures back a few days ago.

It was interesting to compare digital photos from our 2004 Hawaii trip and our 2005 Bermuda trip to the Advantix film photos. It’s obvious why film is barely twitching: The colors were brighter on the digital shots, and the resolution noticeably better. The photo above is typical; in bright light, Advantix does pretty well. (That’s me in the open car of the Sugar Cane Train, waiting to pull out of Lahaina.) In low light, Advantix got very grainy, and the colors lost most of their subtlety.

Carol paid for digital images on CD, which saved me having to scan prints into our photo archives, and that was quite welcome. One annoyance: The digital images were numbered 1-25, but in reverse order. In other words, photo 25 was the first photo taken on the roll, photo 24 the second taken, and so on. I don’t know if a tech at Target messed this up, or if it was an engineering brainfart associated with the machines.

No matter. My NOS Kodak V530 is on its way, and I’ll be getting a G11 one of these days. But Hawaii reminded us that film is mostly dead for a reason: Color, resolution, convenience, immediacy, and probably a few more. There are probably circumstances where film can still shine, but tourist photography is not one of them.

Boy. Keith and I talked about starting a magazine called Digital Camera Techniques in 1996. We didn’t. Talk about opportunities missed.

Posted in: Reviews.
Tagged: photography · travel

The Unenforceable Mandate

Apr 2nd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

17 comments

I hadn’t intended to write anything about health insurance reform, in large part because the debate has become so utterly poisonous, but also in part because I felt that the important issues have been adequately dealt with elsewhere. Well, there’s something that isn’t really being discussed and should be, because it cuts to the heart of how health insurance works, and may be the hinge upon which the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) succeeds or fails. One would think that that would be discussed all over the place, but it’s not, neither in the liberal press (which I read) nor in the conservative press (which I also read.) In fact, so little has the issue been mentioned anywhere that I’ve begun to think I’m missing something crucial.

So let me begin by reiterating what most people know or should know: Health insurance is a really lousy business. Profit levels in health insurance run from 2.5% to 5%, depending on who you’re talking about and whose numbers you believe. Insurers are not making a lot of money, and what they do make they make only by doing everything in their power to exclude the people who need health insurance the most. Google “recission” and “purging” (sometimes called “reunderwriting”) in a health insurance context if you don’t believe me. Many people (including me) consider such practices tantamount to fraud, but that’s not the point I want to make. The point is that even while making full use of recission and reunderwriting, the health insurers are earning maybe 3% profits on average.

Like I said, a lousy business.

So. Enter health care reform. Insurance companies will be required to take (and keep) all comers, irrespective of pre-existing conditions. That’s called “guaranteed issue.” To make it work, all people will be required to buy health insurance, including people who choose not to buy it today, typically because they’re young and healthy. This requirement to buy insurance is the “individual mandate.” The individual mandate enlarges the pool of the insured and thus the amount of money available to pay claims. Without the individual mandate, people would buy insurance only when they needed it, which really isn’t “insurance” in any honest sense of the word. The pool of funds to pay claims would shrink, and claims would explode. The insurers would be gone like that.

Basically, the price of guaranteed issue is the individual mandate. You can’t have the first without the second. I think this is well-understood and not controversial at all. The devil, as usual, is in the fine print. In the bill as passed, people who choose not to buy health insurance will be required to pay a minimum fine of $695 in any given year, or 2.5% of their income, whichever is greater. Those fined would still be able to get insurance when they needed it under the provisions of guaranteed issue. This in itself is a problem, because the cost of insurance is likely to be much higher than 2.5% of income for a huge number of people. 2.5% of a $100,000 annual salary is $2500–dare ya to find a policy for that. A guy making $100K could just pay the $2500 and buy a guaranteed-issue $7000/year policy as soon as the bad lab tests came back, thus saving $4500/year without any downside for all the years that he stays healthy, and pushing that saved cost onto the insured.

I think this is dangerous. It’s not being talked about enough, but it’s being talked about a little, in a few relatively large publications. However, it’s not why I’m writing this entry.

A few weeks ago, I read an article by Timothy Noah in Slate about this very issue. Noah’s thrust was elsewhere, but my jaw dropped when I read Noah quoting from the health care reform bill itself. I clicked through to the monster PDF text of the final bill as passed, to verify what he had said. I blinked. I rubbed my eyes. I got up and went to the fridge for some diet ginger ale. I came back, and it was still there:

In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure.

This from page 336 of the bill as it was passed. On the same page, there is a provision that the government may not

(i) file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section, or (ii) levy on any such property with respect to such failure.

Read those quotes again. The bill outlaws its own enforcement. If you refuse to buy insurance and refuse to pay the fine for not buying insurance…nothing happens. The individual mandate is thus unenforceable, but you can lay odds that guaranteed issue will be mercilessly enforced against the insurance companies. I’m sure there’s some legal interpretation to be done here, but Noah’s point is that there is considerable temptation for mass civil disobedience on the individual mandate without any downside for those disobeying. What he doesn’t say is that such mass civil disobedience could lead to the collapse of the private health insurance industry.

Others in the blogosphere have begun to notice this in the last few days. But why hasn’t it shown up in the major media? You’d think the Wall Street Journal would be screaming about it in every other issue. Didn’t anybody actually read the bill?

Don’t answer that.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged: health · politics

Hurray for the Leaners!

Apr 1st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Say what you want about cold fusion; it’s been a great show and a huge amount of fun. If time allowed I would read more on it; right now, the only book I’ve been through is Fire from Ice by Eugene Mallove, the cold fusion culture’s first martyr. In 2004, Mallove was murdered, probably by muggers, but Certain People are sure that it was the government, or the oil companies, or Arabic shieks, or somebody else who would be on the losing end of the energy stick if cold fusion actually came true.

Mallove’s book is now 11 years old and is strongly pro, and I need to read Gary Taubes’ book Bad Science (1993) for balance. Beyond that, well, the literature, having lain low for many years, is exploding again in celebration of finding a whole new name. (More on this shortly.)

I know, I know. How can I take any of this seriously, you ask? Back off, man. I’m a scientist. I also like street theater, especially science and technology street theater. I suffer fools gladly if they entertain me, because I learn best when I’m entertained. (Fools spouting politics rarely entertain me; street theater has its limits.) I’ve stated my official position here many times, and I’ll say it again: It’s probably not fusion. But it’s almost certainly interesting, and if pursued may actually turn out to be something useful, if not a source of free energy. Desktop fusion is nothing new, after all: Philo Farnsworth, needing to do penance for having invented television, went on to create desktop fusion. The nut they couldn’t crack is releasing more energy than their gadget absorbed, but hey, neutrons are useful, and they don’t just come when you whistle.

I was pleased to learn quite recently that “cold fusion” as a term has been deprecated in favor of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) which has the authority of an acronym and no obvious links in the public mind to a name more properly associated with margarine. A recent presentation on YouTube from a cold fusion guru admits that it’s not about fusion, and that’s a big step forward. I’m not sure that there as many rabbits in the LENR hat as Krivit thinks, but even one rabbit would be delicious, especially with melted butter.

LENR is supposedly caught up with the electroweak force. One thing I do need to do is hunt down a good summary of what we know about the electroweak force; there are a few too many Greek letters in the Wikipedia article for my tastes, and probably my forebrain as well. Suggestions always welcome.

As an SF writer LENR fascinates me, especially the notion that it could be implemented in biological system. Nuclear-powered cockroaches, anyone? The bugs wouldn’t need to make breakeven; LENR could act as a storage mechanism: After gathering and processing fuel during times of energy abundance, they’d consume the fuel when their only sun sets for a decade or two and temps go down to double digits K.

The show goes on. LENR can and should replace all mention of “cold fusion.” The LENR acronym suggests to me a general term for people pursuing (or cheering on) research in that area: Leaners. I’m a Leaner. I’m cheering for these guys, and with more lifespan ahead of me, more time, more brains, and another small fortune in machine tools beyond what I already have, I would go downstairs and see what I could throw together. Damn, this stuff calls to me.

It’s April, the month to be mad as a hatter, and you know all about me and hats.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis, Rants.
Tagged: fringe science · Rants · science

Odd Lots

Mar 31st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I’ve been thin on Contra entries this month for a number of reasons, mostly because I’ve been putting the bulk of my creative energy into finishing “Drumlin Wheel.” Nailed the first draft (after nine years!) about an hour ago. Originally scoped out at about 11,000 words (like “Drumlin Boiler”) it ended up at 14,500. As always, when something major emerges from my subconscious I tend to hate it for a couple of weeks, after which I can fix what’s wrong and like it again. More on this at some point.
While in Hawaii recently, we heard whale songs through a hydrophone that the tour boat crew had tossed into the water, and I immediately wanted one of my own. (We hope not to wait another five years to go back to Hawaii.) Here’s an article on how to make your own hydrophone, which is nothing more than a waterproof mic on a (long) cable.
I finished reading Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You by Dr. Uffe Ravnskov shortly after we got back from Hawaii, and was about to write a review when I realized that Tom Naughton had already done it–and written just about what I would have.
Somebody put a window in the side of one cylinder of a 4-stroke engine, and took a slow-mo video of the action inside the cylinder during actual operation. An amazing thing, even though some frames are missing from the exhaust stroke.
Oh, I’ve seen sillier things than this…but not recently.
And finally, CNN reminded me that the original Xerox copier, model 914, was fifty years old yesterday. The article is marginal and doesn’t even include a color photo of the gadget, of which I repaired many many many between 1974 and 1977. There’s a better photo of the Brown Beast here, along with numerous other Xerox goodies.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: electronics · hardware · health · humor

Report: EntConnect 2010

Mar 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

The first thing you see is an unattended and otherwise empty folding table holding a Sharpie marker and a roll of duct tape. A strip of tape reads “Nametag Station” and there is an example. Remember that this is a conference for people who learn fast, do things their own way, and use what they have on hand.

Welcome to EntConnect 2010.

I briefly described the conference in my February 22, 2010 entry. It was a piece of early community building by the founder/owner of Midnight Engineering magazine, the other Bill Gates. Bill originally pitched it as a ski outing, but it grew from there into go karting, skeet shooting, and ultimately conference sessions–and has long outlived Bill’s poor magazine, which like my own has been gone for a number of years. The 2010 gathering was the 19th, and I was no more than ten minutes into the first session when I was kicking myself for not having attended years ago.

It’s not a huge group. I’m guessing 35 people came out, and an amazing number have been there for most and sometimes all of the previous conferences. Nor is it an especially young crowd; I’m guessing a median age of 45 or 50. Nearly all of them own their own technical businesses, and some have owned (and sold) several. That’s the core mission of the conference: to leverage the collective experience of the attendees in working on their own and making a living thereby. The presentations were a good balance of technical and life-experience descriptions. (Here’s the schedule with the names of the sessions.) I shared a table in the conference room with Jack Krupansky, who was a long-time advertiser at PC Techniques and very much a kindred spirit, and met a great many others cut from the same rugged and mostly self-organizing cloth. The dinner conversation was dumbfounding, with ideas and insights whizzing past my ears far faster than I could internalize them.

The sessions were superb, and some were so high-energy that I felt a little drained when they were over. The keynote session from Dave Grenewetzki was like that. Here’s a guy only a little older than me who has lived life at a dead run, having had careers in aerospace engineering, early computer software (back to the CP/M era) and computer games, with several startups to his credit and a longish stint at the helm of Sierra Online. He’s also one of the world’s most accomplished geocachers. His message: Follow the fun. Well, I try, but most of the time the fun runs a lot faster than I do.

Lee Devlin presented a technical and economic overview of 3-D printing, which was not all new news for me, having loosely followed the field since I began studying nanotechnology fifteen years ago. It was, however, the first time I was able to hold in my own hands and examine some ABS parts created on a professional 3-D printer. The parts were much less “fuzzy” than photos I’ve seen online, granting that they were produced on a $32,000 machine (the Stratasys Dimension SST1200es) and not the $1000 Cupcake CNC gadget we’ve been seeing on the Make Blog recently. I have been hoping to learn 3-D CAD for many years, and seeing the Alibre Design parametric CAD software pushed that item up my personal priority list a few dozen spots. Lee persuaded me that this technology is coming into its own (I had been thinking it was still a sort of stunt driven by mechasmic Extropian dreams) and I would love to give it a shot in the reasonable future.

Some of the sessions presented topics worthy of their own entries here, and I’ll come back to them eventually–especially Bill French’s presentation on auditing your own Web site for customer accessibility. I saw some things I probably won’t pursue (like the Flash-based prezi.com presentation software) but think may be useful to others; certainly take a look. Digital photography loomed large (several of the attendees are professional photographers) and a great deal was said about the practical challenges of starting businesses, running businesses, and (courtesy Jeff Schmoyer) getting free of them when you have to move on.

The intensity of the conference was remarkable. Everybody who spoke spoke with the kind of passion that makes problems run screaming. I recall that passion from my early days with Keith launching The Coriolis Group and PC Techniques, and I miss it. The passion didn’t end with the sessions, and in fact I don’t know precisely when it ended because I had already collapsed into bed long before the lights in our conference room went out.

The next EntConnect will take place March 24-27, 2011, at (as best I know) the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Denver, right off the famous 16th Street Mall. It’s already on my calendar, and I’d love to see you there.

Posted in: None Of The Above.
Tagged: travel

Odd Lots

Mar 26th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Here’s a great article from NASA on the unexpected success it’s had with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft in spotting previously unknown asteroids in the infrared spectrum. WISE is detecting hundreds of new asteroids every day, which is unnerving, since a rock no bigger than a Motel 6 could cause regional devastation greater than any nuclear weapon yet produced.
From Larry Nelson comes a pointer to the AirStash, an interesting $100 USB Wi-Fi gadget that can accept up to a 32 GB SD card and act as a content server over Wireless b/g. Anthough nominally a thumb drive, the USB plug also charges the internal battery, and (though it’s not screamed from the rooftops) the thingie works all by itself, no computer connection required. This suggests “wearable file sharing”: Drop one in your pocket and nearby people can download files from the device without having any idea where it actually is. Little by little, the jiminy (an AI wearable computer I thought up in 1983, and figured would be mature by 2027) creeps toward realization. The AI is actually the tough part; everything else already exists, if not in as small a package as I imagined 25 years ago.
And if you ever wanted to run Linux on one of your fillings (ok, one of your elephant’s fillings) this would be the solution. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
Here’s a gadget that builds you an external USB storage device by dropping in (literally) a naked SATA hard drive. I may not need it, but I admire the elegance of the concept.
I’ve been arguing in favor of dual-screen reader devices for years, and this one is a good start. Sounds like the user interface software needs work…but when has that not been an issue for a first-gen device? We’re closing in on it, though.
Nice status update on some of the current non-Tokamak fusion research approaches, link thanks to Frank Glover.
Also from Frank comes a reasonable article on how people would die in a vacuum and how they wouldn’t. I had heard of lung shredding; heart failure was new to me. But take, um, heart: Your blood wouldn’t boil.
If you ever wondered why you cry when you slice onions, well, it’s the sulfuric acid released by cells in the onion when they’re cut open. Supposedly living things evolved this mechanism (or at least key parts of it) half a billion years ago. Onions evolved their chemical weapons to avoid being laid on hamburgers in slices–but we evolved Vidalias to prove that we were smarter than onions, and that fast food will prevail against all threats.
Interestingly, the Canon G11 camera reduces the size of the image sensor to 10 megapixels, down from the 12.5 on the G10. The new sensor gives you fewer pixels but better ones, and faster, which is all for the best.
Burger King is testing a new retailing feature in Brazil. When you order a burger, they take your picture and print your face on the burger wrapper.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · ebooks · hardware · linux · photography · science · software

The Longest Day

Mar 25th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

The longest day of any vacation is generally the last day, and that goes triple for Hawaii vacations. (More on this shortly.) We got packed up and checked out of the hotel by 11, and went down to Kihei for lunch and some browsing-of-shops. That done, we cruised up the west coast of Maui to Lahaina for more of the same, plus a ride on the Sugar Cane Train, also known as the Lahaina & Kaanapoli Railroad.

It’s a narrow-gauge live steamer that once hauled workers and tonnage between the now-defunct Maui sugar cane plants and downtown Lahaina. Investors bought the line when its longtime owners put it up for sale in 1969, and for 40 years it’s been hauling tourists at ten miles an hour along a six-mile run that cuts through an exclusive golf course where the grade crossings are for golf carts. We waved at a lot of Japanese golfers who didn’t seem particularly annoyed that we interrupted their game. This may be because the train is a huge attraction for Japanese tourists, to the point where all the signs in the station and on the train are in both English and Japanese.

The track is a little rough, and it’s a clattery, noisy run that I suspect beautifully captures the atmosphere of most short lines in the steam era. Alas, the locos are not original, since a well-heeled locomotive collector (specializing in 1:1 scale!) bought whatever the line had been using prior to the sale. What’s there now is a cute little oil-fired Porter 2-4-0 that (sans tender) could fit in my garage. (The Web site does not picture the Porter, which is not as glitzy-glam as the other loco, which was in the shed getting some work done.) There’s a Baldwin 0-6-0 on display on the grounds outside the station, but whether it ever ran on the line is unclear.

We spent the rest of the afternoon prowling the shops in downtown Lahaina and watching the crabs frolic on the rocks along the ocean. After a slightly late supper downing some estimable sliders at Cheeseburger Island Style in Wailea, we picked up our bags at the hotel for the long flight home.

People who don’t go to Hawaii much may not have heard that most flights from Hawaii to the mainland are redeyes: You take off circa 10:30 PM and fly for six or seven hours across three time zones, making for a landing at 7 or 8 AM. This is done for the sake of making connecting flights in Dallas or Phoenix or Denver; otherwise, the plane lands after most of the day’s connecting flights to smaller cities are gone.

I’m an insomniac even in my own bed; sleeping while sitting upright on an airliner is a wistful fantasy. Carol, by contrast, puts on one of those foam sleep-collars and is out like a light. So I sat and read Thomas Cahill’s marvelous Mysteries of the Middle Ages for two and a half hours until I realized that I was no longer taking notes in the margins, which for me generally means that my higher brain functions had shut down and I was now merely scanning words. For the rest of the flight I tried to put myself to sleep via several meditative methods, none of which worked at all. I was mighty glad at the five-hour mark, when the crew put the coffee pot on and I could wake myself up chemically to the point where I could think again.

We changed planes in Phoenix for the 90-minute hop to Denver, where we discovered that a huge blizzard had struck the previous afternoon. Over a foot had fallen (up to 21″ in some places) and the roads were a mess. By the time we got to Denver, I was staggering, and after lunch Carol took the 93-mile drive home in the slushy right lane, while we looked apprehensively at all the cars in the ditch, among them plenty of four-wheelers. Here in the Springs it was a mere matter of two or three inches, and today’s bright sun will melt most of that. More significantly, I slept for eleven hours last night, and thus life finally returned to normal after twenty-odd hours of continuous awakeness.

Much to do here. EntConnect in fact began today, but I will not be heading up to Denver until tomorrow afternoon for the 6 PM happy hour. I’ll try to post updates while I’m there, so stay tuned.

Posted in: Travelogs.
Tagged: trains · travel

Papaya, Not Popeye

Mar 23rd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

To paraphrase myself paraphrasing George Carlin: What do editors do on their day off? They can’t just lay around…

Oh, you bet they can. In fact, Carol and I had the wisdom to declare at least one day of our impromptu Hawaii vacation a “lay around” day when there would be no scheduled activity whatsoever. None! Nada! Zilch! Eat when we want, get wet when (and where) we want, and leave the car keys in the hotel room safe.

And we made it work. We ran around in the surf, sat in the hot tub, read Thomas Cahill books, and probably ate a little too much, though I can’t imagine (at this point) eating too much papaya.

The weekend just past was another matter entirely. We got up at 5:30 Saturday morning to catch a two-hour whale-watch cruise. As I mentioned in my last entry, the whales were evident from our ocean-view window. The cruise was to see them up close, and we certainly got closer than we did from the hotel balcony. We got to see something else up close, too: big waves and a stinging wind that were (we heard) the remnants of a storm that had scoured the north part of New Zealand ten days ago. I took one look at those wine-dark seas (for wine colored blue-green with streaks of sandy brown, at least) and popped a Bonine nervously. I have warm feelings toward the Navy: As I related here some years ago, when I was 17 the Navy believed in me (and pestered me for weeks to accept a full college NROTC scholarship) for personal enthusiasms that my first two girlfriends considered deranged. (My third girlfriend sat patiently while I explained the fourth dimension to her, and that’s when I knew I wanted to marry her.) All that said, Popeye I’m not, and I gripped the stanchions tightly while watching the bounding main for breaching whales.

We saw a few, and I considered the day a success, even though the berserk surf got bad enough to wash away significant portions of Polo Beach and cause the rest of the day’s cruises to be canceled. I was hours trying to get the wine-dark wobble out of my gait, and I haven’t had any wine for two weeks.

Sunday we got up at 4:30 AM for a snorkel cruise to the collapsed caldera island of Molokini, where the visibility underwater can reach 150 feet. We were smart enough to rent wetsuit tops from the cruise operators and glad of it, as the water was a chilly 72 degrees and the air none too warm either at 8 AM. Temps were the least of it, however: The reduced but still formidable swells had us bobbing like corks and struggling to stay steady enough to watch the fish, who had the sense (and the gills) to remain well beneath all the action. The fish were great to see, but after fighting the rolling water for twenty minutes, people started to bail and climb back onto the 36-foot catamaran. I lasted a little longer (maybe 45 minutes) but Carol stuck it out for over two hours. No surprise there: She’s the daughter of an imperturbable Navy marine engine mechanic; I’m the son of a excitable Army radio operator who was sick the entire trip across the Atlantic on his way to Italy in 1942.

Like I said: Papayas, yes, Popeye, no way.

On the trip back to Maui, the cruise people did an interesting thing: They dropped a hydrophone into the water on 50 feet of cable, and patched the mic into the boat’s PA system. And for fifteen minutes we listened to the whales. It was eerie, and perhaps beyond eerie. We’re not used to thinking of animals as volitional the same way we are, but those guys were clearly doing something down there. Whale songs change a little every year, but generally only one phrase at a time. And thinking about a pattern in which only one element changes at a predictable interval, I can’t help but speculate that they’re counting something: years, generations, intervals until the saucers come back; who knows? There’s a story in there somewhere, though I’m not the guy to do it.

There is a permanent hydrophone in the water near Kihei, less than a mile from where we were at the time, and you can listen to it live. The whales will be around until they begin to migrate back to their feeding grounds in Alaska at the end of March, and will be gone by the end of April.

The boat’s naturalist said that the whales were very close, and almost in answer, two of them surfaced just to one side of the boat. It was a cow humpback and its calf, followed shortly after by an “escort” male. They were less than 100 feet from the catamaran, and the captain killed the engine instantly, as required by law. We watched them play around for another fifteen minutes until they got bored and left.

The remainder of the trip back was like a second (and more successful) whale watch cruise. The water between Maui and Molokini was lousy with whales, and we saw two dozen or more in the hour’s passage. In the shallower water near shore we spotted ten or twelve green sea turtles, which eyed us apprehensively as we cruised slowly past.

So it was a busy and bobbly weekend, followed by a lazy day that I consider entirely successful. What do editors do on their day off? They lay around–so that, when they get back home, they can stand to be editors again. Mission accomplished. (Now I have to research how to build my own hydrophone for our next trip…)

Posted in: Travelogs.
Tagged: travel

I Plum Forgot…

Mar 19th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

…to tell you that we’d gone to Hawaii. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. But after five years without a real vacation (and by “real” I mean “with a salt-water beach and palm trees”) we just packed up and went, no regrets and little time spent packing. I mean, they have Wal-Marts in Hawaii, so whatever we might fail to bring can be had without much anguish.

No anguish necessary. We brought everything we had to have (like, how badly does anybody need socks in Hawaii?) and Maui suits me just fine: Ten minutes after we got into our room overlooking Polo Beach, Carol was out on the balcony staring at the blue ocean, when she yells, “A whale!” And by cracky, one of them 40-ton bass yodelers had just thrown itself out of the depths and most of the way up into the sunlight. For another half an hour we watched, and they were out there in force, frolicking, flapping their flukes, and finding it all a fine, fine time.

Didn’t expect whales. And after five years, I’d forgotten a certain amount of beach discipline. That blue water looked so damned good after a deep frozen winter that simply won’t end (and still hasn’t) that I just waded in, forgetting I was wearing my expensive titanium-frame prescription sunglasses until a seven-foot wave crested over my head and knocked them off, simultaneously sending twin columns of high-pressure saline solution up my nose. Once I could breathe again I realized that my sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, and Carol and I spent another half an hour examining the ocean bottom during the wave troughs. We found a hotel key card and then somebody else’s sunglasses, as well as a heavily corroded penny and a sea urchin spine, before Carol sang out that she had them. That was a helluva break, considering how the waves were stirring up the sand on the bottom. The lenses picked up a few pits and scratches but are otherwise intact, and that is a mistake I doubt I will make again any time soon.

To celebrate our unlikely victory, I returned to my hard-drinking ways at dinner that evening, and had not one but two margaritas with my grilled walu.

Not much more to report. You all know what Hawaii looks like, and if I had had the presence of mind to install a photo editor on my new laptop before we left, I might have been able to post a picture or two here. The weather has been perfect, if a little windy. The food’s good, the bed’s great, the company sans pareille. I vacation as men might choose, though if I do get to choose, I choose not to wait another five years to do it again!

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: food · travel

Odd Lots

Mar 13th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

It happens all the time, but it’s rare that we actually watch it happen: a comet falling into the Sun. (It’s unclear to me what the brief tiny streaks are, since SOHO is a spacecraft and the image was not taken through Earth’s atmosphere, where meteors would look like that. Meteors in the solar atmosphere?)
The SOHO spacecraft may also be shedding some light on why the recent solar minimum was so deep.
We’ve identified what may be a much better proxy for ancient climate: clam shells. Unlike tree growth rings, which may be affected by several factors like rainfall, sunlight, soil chemistry, and so on, clam shell growth (and the mix of isolotopes, particularly oxygen) seem very closely correlated to the temperature of the water in which the clam lived out its life.
Intel’s Nehalen-based Gulftown CPU has been officially announced, with six 3.33 GHz cores and 32 nm traces connecting a boggling 1.2 billion transistors. They’re calling it the Core I7-980X Extreme Edition, and it fits the LGA 1366 socket, which implies than it can be swapped in as an upgrade. (No confirmation on that yet.) You may be able to get an overclocked desktop system running all six cores at 4.3 GHz by April. And if that’s not enough cores for you (four is way more than enough for me, if this past year’s experience is any guide) we’ll be seeing the eight-core Nehalen-EX (with 2.3 billion transistors) later this year, nominally for the server market.
I know, I know, AMD has its Magny-Cours 12-core Opteron server CPU, but the cores only run at 1.7 GHz–and more to the point, exist on two separate side-by-side six-core dies, which may be cheating a little. I’m sure they’re very good chips, but sheesh! We still don’t know how to do parallelism in general terms. Even AMD is puzzled, so they launched a contest titled, “What would you do with 48 cores?”
And if you don’t believe me, open Windows Task Manager, click the Performance tab, and watch all your cores but one do nothing. To paraphrase George Carlin: What do cores do on their day off? They can’t just lay around…that’s their job!
Frank Glover put me on to an interesting hand-drawn animated movie that I hope to see fairly soon, if I can find anywhere playing it. (Distribution in the US is inexplicably a problem for them.) The Secret of Kells is about the Book of Kells, and (more intriguingly) is drawn in the style of medieval manuscript illumination. It took a few seconds watching the trailer to catch on, but eventually I had the feeling that I was watching manuscript illuminations come to life. Damned cool.
And 229 years ago today, Sir Frederick William Herschel first spotted Uranus.