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WEEK 29 2005
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Saturday 23 July
2005
Saturday
- It was suggested some time back that the Moon's pole's might contain
great quantities of water, in craters never exposed to daylight.
Water is a wonderful thing to have in space - you can drink it, of
course, use it for cooling, for growing food, you can split the
molecule into Oxygen to breath and Hydrogen to use as rocket fuel, and
so on and so on. A probe with a gamma-ray spectrometer has recently
passed over the lunar poles and reported great quantities of Hydrogen,
though no camera has actually seen
ice there.
But now, on Mars, in a crater near the pole, we have this picture at
APOD. For a sense of scale, if the crater is 35 kilometers wide
then the lake is perhaps eight kilometers, or five miles wide!
Friday
22 July
2005
Friday - finished
MacBride's Civil
War Ironclads. Interesting book - found it at the local library -
it covers both the North and South's "ironclads", and the various
issues involved in their design and deployment. (Note: a quick search
of Amazon.com brings up a
number of books on civil war ironclads, some much newer.)
The South's Virginia style
casement ironclads; which were pretty much the only design the South
built, were a deadly danger to
the unarmored wooden ships of the North being used to blockade and
starve the South of resources. They built on the South's strength's,
being made primarily of local timber and using straightforward timber
construction - not much in the way of compound curves or other design
features that required expertise. Straight casement sides meant that
even the armor was easy to attach. But they suffered in conflict
from bad engines, bad steering qualities, and other rather slapdash
design quirks. The biggest design flaw was probably their draught -
they often drew in excess of 25' - an insane amount for vessels to be
used in littoral conflict. The records are full of southern ironclads
running aground in their own home waters!
In addition the naval construction efforts had almost no priority with
the south - they had immense trouble in getting the iron for armor
plating, and then in using any of the few foundries and mills, and then
in finally getting the required permission from the
Confederate Army for rail stock to transfer the armor from any of the
few southern foundries and rolling mills to the construction sites. As
a result the wooden hulls would be built in a few weeks or months, then
sit for months or years waiting for the armor: i.e., the iron cladding. When the north finally
closed in on a particular harbor or bay it would be too late - the
uncompleted vessels would be burned or blown up. Given that much of the
North's (successful) strategy depended on using control of the rivers
to split up the Confederacy this was a remarkably short sighted
attitude on the part of the South's high command.
The North's monitor's (the generic term coming from the name of the
first ship designed, the Monitor, although she was the only one of her
class) were rather more successful. Like the south's vessels, the
monitors were slow and hard to steer. Their lack of freeboard or excess
flotation meant that only a small amount of water getting in could (and
did) sink
them in seconds. The captains
and crews were thus appropriately terrified of
'torpedoes', what we would call 'mines' today, since the wooden hulls
below the waterline would easily spring a leak under the concussive
effect.
In toto, though, the North's designer, Ericsson, was a genius, and his
design worked.The northern
monitors drew little water - 10' and even less for some
designs, were very nearly invulnerable to ship fire, and very resistant
to shore battery fire. (After an abortive attempt to take Charleston
harbor with 8 ironclads, for example, some returned having survived hundreds of hits
by shore batteries.) There were several successive design iterations,
the faults and virtues of each design being applied to the next.
Thursday 21 July 2005
Thursday
- still just working away.
Outsourcing jobs overseas is hot, offshoring
as it is called; but I recall watching an interview on TV with an
'expert' on the subject earlier this year. It seems that half of all such
attempts fail, but that 90% of large corporations still have such plans.
Heh.
Thinking about it, it seems clear that the first company moving jobs
into a country with a plenitude of educated and intelligent
professionals is going to do well. Indian programmers would be a case
in point. But as more and more firms join the gold rush the caliber of
the individuals available is going to fall. At some point the
offshoring becomes more trouble than it's worth - friends and I (all
involved in the engineering software business) have discussed this, and
wondered whether it will happen in time to save our jobs/careers.
Recently, over at the 101-280 blog
there is a post, RUNNING
OUT OF INDIANS, related to this, and on 'nearshoring' (Canada), and
on the proposed Seacode
initiative of anchoring a ship just outside the three mile limit,
filled with cheap programmers.
In short, the
"infinite free foreign programmers" bogeyman is colliding
with the same supply/demand constraints as every other commodity.
Indian programmer wages have now evidently risen to the same level as
at least some North American programmer wages, minus an amount equal to
the hassle factor of dealing with India.
There is also the CAMERAPHONE post, involving dead horses. No pics,
it's safe to look at.
And further down the page he even has a Social Security reform idea:
So what's my
Social Security reform proposal? As a matter of fact, I do have one,
and here it is:
"Let me
out of Social Security."
Notice I didn't
say "let everyone out" -- I mean that I
specifically would like Congress to pass a law that says "we resolve
that Evan Kirchhoff of San Francisco is allowed to exit the Social
Security program immediately". They can even keep all the money I've
put in so far, how about that? Maybe I'm some kind of nut for believing
the government can't magically spend the same dollars twice, and I've
certainly read enough eye-glazing political debates about it, so I'm
happy to grant that everyone but me should stay with the status quo.
This also avoids the arguments about which hypothetical people are too
incompetent to manage their own retirements -- I know I'm not, but who
am I to judge such a thing for anyone else? QED!
Oh, I know this
wouldn't really be fair, since the current
contributions are needed to pass through to others, so here's a
compromise: I'm willing to pay 50% of my Social Security taxes in
perpetuity, in exchange for being allowed to exit the program now.
That's right: I'll keep on paying half and expect nothing back, and I
guarantee that I can do much more for my future self with an additional
6% of my money than several decades of arbitrary U.S. governments will
do with 12%.
Heh.
Wednesday
20 July 2005
Wednesday - In honor the the first moon
landing, on this date in 1969, we now have Google Maps Moon.
Finished "Schrodinger's
Kitten's" by John Gribbin, found in a stack of used books owned by
a friend. It was a fun read, though I don't really think I came away
with any new information on Quantum Mechanics. And though it is about
ten years since publication, but I'm not sure the field is progressing
all that rapidly. His final summing up is generally an admonition that
all idea's about the nature of reality are "models" and that there is
nothing wrong with using the model that fits a particular aspect of
reality - be it the wave theory, the particle theory, or the warped
spacetime theory.
Apart from the weird stuff - Schrodinger's cat, the two slit experiment
and the half silvered mirror experiment, quantum entanglement, etc. -
Gribben does have a
knack for a quick "biographical portrait in a nutshell". Fresnel,
Davy's, Faraday, Newton, Bose and many others make brief entertaining
appearances. I see that he has other books along the science historical
theme, for example: Science:
A History 1534:2001; and that there is an upcoming book that may be
something along these lines: The
Scientific Revolution, out later this year.
Tuesday 19
July
2005
Tuesday - finished 'Olympos'.
It was an OK read - not spectacular. Lot's of violence and sex, as
befits a book using the Iliad
as a source :-) I though the wrap up and victories by the good guys
rather quick unconvincing after a two volume build up, and there was
quite a bit of stuff that was really extraneous to the story. Perhaps
Simmon's needs a better editor - he's got good stuff but it's put
together in a sort of sloppy fashion.
Monday
18 July 2005
Monday - keeping busy.
I see that Morgan Spurlock of "Super Size Me" fame now has a whole
website devoted to debunking him, the Morgan Spurlock Watch.
[via Instapundit]
Ethically I'd put Spurlock on par with Michael Moore, but
professionally he seems not to be quite as slick at his dishonesty.
Apparently he has something new out, "30 days", calling for a higher
minimum wages and so on, which is apparently made in an equally
dishonest manner.
I didn't know he was another Fidel Castro fan, but it figures.
Sunday 17 July
2005
Sunday - there was a little barbecue for
my Dad's birthday. The usual gang was there, and some of the other
suspects phoned in to say "hi". It wasn't too warm in the evening,
which was nice after our week of roasting.
My brother and I presented him with a TIVO. We then just sat about
drinking beer, eating birthday cake and just talking, until he demanded that we set it up. It was,
except for an apparently faulty phone line at the house, a remarkably
easy thing to setup.
