I’ve Been Thunderstruck

Ever wonder what a square foot, or a yard equals in "sensible units?" As in things that really matter? Well, head over to sensibleunits.com and you can find out things like:

• 1 Square Foot Equals
• 2.1 CDs
• 1.3 Large Pizzas
• 1.2 Tennis Racquet Heads
• 1 Yard Equals
• 7.6 CDs Side By Side
• 18 AA Batteries End to End
• 4.2 Average Soccer Ball Diameters
• 1 Centimeter Equals
• 1.0 Stacked CD Cases
• 29 Human Female Fingernail Thicknesses
• 1.3 Dry Basmati Rice Grains End to End

The possibilities are endless…give it a shot!

I stumbled across Goosh today, which is a command line interface to Google. I’ve gotta admit I never even though of the utility of a command line interface for Google. But it’s cool, and you should check it out.

Goosh goosh.org 0.4.4-beta #1 Tue, 03 Jun 08 22:59:00 UTC Google/Ajax
Welcome to goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.
This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page.
goosh is written by Stefan Grothkopp <grothkopp@gmail.com>
it is NOT an official google product!
Your language has been set to: en (use lang to change it)
Enter help or h for a list of commands.

guest@goosh.org:/web>

Check out KB276304 from Microsoft. There’s apparently a bug that appears when Windows 2000 is configured to authenticate against an MIT Kerberos domain that throws the following error message:

Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.

Holy smokes!

Yes, they do, if you happen to live in western Kenya. What follows is a story that was posted today at MSNBC.com, titled "Kenya mob reportedly burns 11 ‘witches’":

NAIROBI, Kenya - A group of up to 300 young men have burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya — in some cases slitting their victims’ throats or clubbing them to death before burning their bodies, officials said.

The gang moved from home to home through two villages, identifying their victims by using a list with names of suspected witches and wizards and the kind of spells they were believed to have cast on the community, said Ben Makori, a local councilor.

"The villagers are complaining that the (suspected) wizards and witches are making the bright children in the community dumb…. These (suspected) witches are not doing good things to us," Makori told The Associated Press on the phone.

Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino said the gang hunted down the eight women and three men in the western Kenya villages of Kekoro and Matembe. Most of the victims were between 70 and 90 years old, Owino said.

Senior administrator Njoroge Ndirangu said the gang hunted down their victims Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Victims slashed or clubbed
In some cases the gang pulled the victims out of their homes, slit their throats or clubbed them to death, said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The victims were then thrown back into their homes, which the gang had already set on fire, the officer said. He said 36 houses were burned.

Another police officer, Mwaura Njoroge, said the body of a victim burned to death in her house was, "reduced to something so small, you cannot tell which is the leg and which is the arm."

"How can they (the young men) prove that a person is a wizard? It is likely that the people who committed these killings had personal vendettas against their victims," Njoroge said.

"These people identified who is to be killed by accusing their victims of bewitching their sons and daughters," said Ndirangu, the commissioner in charge of Kisii Central district, where one of the villages is located.

Ndirangu said that residents are superstitious and have often targeted suspected witches and wizards, but this week’s attack was the most shocking in recent years.

The police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said investigators had little hope of making progress because the villagers have refused to identify the people who carried out attacks.

(Copyright 2008, Associated Press)

Sometimes I find it absolutely amazing the level of violence that still exists in the world today.

Ever wonder what really defines a meter? Or a second? Or a twip? From Charlie Emrich in the September 2007 issue of Wired comes this list of standards.

• Meter
• Standardized in 1983
• Measures length
• Defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792/458 second
• Second
• Standardized in 1967
• Measures time
• Defined by the time it takes for a cesium-133 atom to cycle 9,192,631,770 times between two specific quantum states
• Ampere
• Standardized in 1948
• Measures electrical current
• Defined by the current required to create a force of 2×10E-7 newtons per meter between two parallel wires
• Kelvin
• Standardized in 1954
• Measures temperature
• Defined by 1/273.16 the temperature of the triple point of water - when it’s simultaneously gas, liquid and solid
• Mole
• Standardized in 1971
• Measure amount of stuff
• Defined by the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon 12 (6.022×10E23)
• Candela
• Standardized in 1979
• Measures brightness
• Defined by the intensity of a 1/683-watt yellow-green light spread over a square meter, seen from a meter away

Now for some more interesting, obscure units of measure.

• Gou
• 180 milliliters - better known as a rice cup for an electric cooker
• Pack Year
• cigarette consumption based on one pack a day for a year
• Nibble
• typically four bit of binary code, or half a byte
• Score
• 20 of something
• Hand
• 4 inches of horse height
• Twip
• 1/20 of a typesetting point
• Thrave
• 24 sheaves of wheat
• Shake
• 10 nanoseconds
• Mickey
• ratio of computer mouse movement to onscreen cursor movement
• Jansky
• strength of radio signals from space
• Butt
• two hogsheads, or about 126 gallons, of booze
• Smoot
• a measure of length developed by some MIT students, equal to 5′ 7" - the height of one Oliver R Smoot

Yesterday I signed up to be a guide at ChaCha, a place where you can go to get answers to any question you have. Primarily SMS (text messaging based), the idea is that a user texts a question to ‘242 242,’ a guide researches the question, then sends and answer back to your mobile. I thought this concept was pretty cool, and since I like researching information so much, I singed up to be a guide. I answered their questionnaire, took their entry tests, and was accepted into the program. Today I spent time doing my 15 test searches, which will allow me to start answering queries for real. And when I do…I get paid a whopping twenty cents per answer! Not a lot of money, but over time it could add up. What impressed me most was the tools that I used to do my research (in beta at ChaCha), and how easy it was to send back an answer. I highly encourage a look at this service, whether you need answers, or you just like to help find answers. I think they’re on to something over there at ChaCha!

I love gadgets as much as many of you do. And most of the ones we get exposed to are pretty cool. But I came across one today that surpasses anything I’ve seen in a long time : The R2D2 Digital Audio and Video Projector by Nikko.

This product pretty much defies description, so I invite you over to their web site to watch the video. But, to pique your interest, here’s a short list of the features:

• Project any digital media up to 260 inches onto walls or ceilings
• Play DVDs and CDs with built-in player
• Connect external devices like iPods, memory cards and USB flashdrives
• Built in 20W speaker system
• Wireless FM out
• Format support : DVD-video, DVD/R/RW, VCD, SCVD, Audio CD, CD-R/RW, WMA, MP3, MP4, DivX 3.0, JPEG
• A seriously cool Millennium Falcon remote!

And all this can be yours for only $2900US!

Your house has more computer power in it than the average laptop! According to an article by Patrick Di Justo in the May 2007 issue of Wired, the modern house has about 31,700 MIPS while the average laptop has about 6,300 MIPS. In case you’re wondering a MIPS are millions of instructions per second, which is a measure of a processors speed. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Typical Laptop : 6,300 MIPS
• Modern House : 31,670 MIPS
• Living Room : 26,750 MIPS
• Xbox : 21,000
• Cable Box : 2,000
• Hi-def DVD : 2,000
• TiVo : 1,000
• Television : 600
• Home Stereo : 150
• Home Office : 2,600 MIPS
• Broadband Router : 800
• Wireless Router : 800
• Smartphone : 500
• Inkjet Printer : 350
• Digital Camera : 150
• Garage : 1,690 MIPS
• Car : 1,300
• Roomba : 80
• Clothes Dryer : 60
• Clothes Washer : 60
• Vacuum : 60
• Heating/Air Conditioning : 60
• Home Security : 60
• LawnBott Lawn Mower : 10
• Kitchen : 420 MIPS
• Refrigerator : 60
• Dishwasher : 60
• Microwave : 60
• Stove : 60
• Toaster : 60
• Blender : 60
• Coffeemaker : 60
• Bedroom and Bathroom : 210 MIPS
• iPod : 200
• Electric Toothbrush : 10

I would have thought that my digital camera had more MIPS than a home stereo, but them I’m also surprised that an Xbox has more MIPS than a laptop. Guess you need a lot of processing power to play Halo 3!

There was an interesting little article in the December 2006 issue of Wired about Fiction vs Fact for several things you’ve heard of before. Check out these excerpts from the article by Aria Pearson:

Fiction: If you fall into quicksand you’ll be sucked under and die.

Fact: You’ll only sink up to your waist.

Fiction: Sitting too close to the TV will ruin your eyes.

Fact: It causes fatigue but no permanent damage.

Fiction: Benjamin Franklin’s kite was struck by lightning.

Fact: The kite picked up electricity from the air, causing an arc between Franklin’s hand and a key tied to his end of the string.

Fiction: A penny dropped from the top of a skyscraper can kill someone.

Fact: It could never pick up enough velocity to kill, just to bang you up a little.

Fiction: Swimming after you eat will cause cramps and lead to drowning.

Fact: These is a very slight risk of cramps, but only for vigorous swimmers.

Fiction: There’s a dark side of the moon.

Fact: The entire lunar surface receives sunlight during the moon’s monthly orbit around Earth.

Fiction: Swallowed chewing gum takes seven years to digest.

Fact: Gum is not digested. It passes through the gastrointestinal system, usually within 24 hours.

Technorati Tags: science debunked,fallacies,fictions,gum,quicksand

The 2008 Summer Olympics in China are a big deal…no doubt about that. The Chinese have gone done a huge amount of work in preparing for what’s often considered the greatest sports gathering on the planet. New venues have been built, the city is being cleaned up for its guests, and athletes all around the world are tuning up for their moment in the sun. And the Chinese hope that it will be sunny, but if not they have a plan…

The Chinese are going to control the weather.

According to this article published recently at TechnologyReview.com, the city’s branch of the national Weather Modification Office has prepared a three-staged plan for helping guide Mother Nature in the right direction.

First, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city’s weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird’s Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over.

Given that August is typically part of the rainy season in Beijing, with daily chances of rain exceeding 50%, the Chinese government would seem to have its work cut out for it. Doubters of this sort of science might point to our own inability to control the weather, but these facts may indicate the Chinese have a jump on the rest of the world:

The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country’s north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People’s Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain–an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China’s second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian’s weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.

Most eyes in the world will be on the athletes competing in China in August. But, for a few scientists and other meteorologists across the world, their eyes will be in the sky…and they hope to not see any rain.