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[Testimonial] -LJ Home- Update! [Calender] [Group View]
Below are a few recent journal entries
| Sunday, 29-Jun-2008 | ||||
| 06/29/2008 12:07 | Too much "Do What I Mean" in calculus notation Somehow, I got thru all of last year, checking my homework using MAPLE, and also using the integration by parts technique for integration, without ever noticing what happened if I tried to type the pieces into MAPLE.  Those are supposed to be equal. Trying to tell it that they are functions fails too, because it doesn't want a function to be the differential. Without a doubt, by far the most confusing aspect of Calculus is figuring out what the hell the person asking the question is talking about in the first place. The notation as it is used by everyone leaves a lot to be desired, its not always clear in the way that a programmer would want it to be. There is too much Do What I Mean notation in Calculus.
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| 06/29/2008 10:21 | Baby rolls a ball Why are there so many websites that say that a baby has to be able to sit up to be able to play "roll the ball"? My son is 5 months old, can't yet sit up on his own, but seems to love holding a tennis ball as well as rolling it to me by either pushing it or swatting it. He does this while on belly, propped back, and laying on the floor - he'll reach out to the ball. If he can't reach it, he will inch forward a little. I don't see why there should be any connection between when the baby figures out that balls roll, and when the baby's center of gravity and abdominal muscle coordination become mature enough that he sit upright. Thats just silly, and its these totally asinine assumptions that have led me to have a rather low opinion of child development studies in general. If I had to make a guess, I'd bet that the ability to hold a tennis ball in two hands is much more closely connected with the "pincher grasp" developmental sign, because at least both of those activities involve using the thumbs in a non "palmer grasp" type of way. I mean, I could totally be wrong, but its nowhere near as farfetched as assuming its related to the ability to sit up!
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| Saturday, 28-Jun-2008 | ||||
| 06/28/2008 23:01 | "Characteristic Equation" Solver I got sick of screwing up problems because I'd misplaced a minus sign or something, so I've decided to start making little programs in MATLAB to do the tedious parts of the homework for me. Haven't tested this completely yet tho, but posting it anyways because the core of the program is done at least, and debugging it if I fucked it up isn't that much of a hassle (I'll correct it here too if I change it.) I mean, in all odds I probably fucked up a minus sign or something here too. Haven't made sure I didn't yet. ( nobody probably wants to read source code on their friends page )
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| Friday, 27-Jun-2008 | ||||
| 06/27/2008 16:20 | Guantanamo Burgers aren't round, don't fit bun -released prisoner I knew that quite some time ago, Colonel Sanders established the first American military presence in Vietnam in decades... What I didn't know until today was that Dave Thomas is a rear admiral in charge of the prison at Guantanamo Bay! I bet those prisoners are really sick of eating square hamburgers by now.
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| Saturday, 14-Jun-2008 | ||||
| 06/14/2008 17:07 | US$1,400,000,000 says the Air Force doesn't like moisture HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii (AP) — The Air Force on Thursday said the first crash of a B-2 stealth bomber was caused by moisture in sensors and estimated the loss of the aircraft at $1.4 billion. The crash probably could have been avoided if knowledge of a technique to evaporate moisture had been disseminated throughout the B-2 program, said Maj. Gen. Floyd L. Carpenter, who headed an accident investigation board. 1,400,000,000 US Dollars down the fucking drain, because people in the air force can't figure out how to evaporate moisture on their own, and nobody in charge had the brains to warn them. If you take your nice airplane to Hawaii, it might get damp, moist, foggy, or even wet! Even on the inside! Just like a car's window on a humid night after an hour of heavy petting. I don't think the people of the United States of America ought to buy the Air Force any more shiny new toys until it learns how to take care of and play with the ones it has properly. "It was just by the grace of God that they were safe, and the good (ejection) system," Carpenter said. OK, now that I know nobody died or got hurt, I can simultaneously shake my head and laugh my ass off. However, a technique learned by some two years ago that had gone widely unknown and unadopted probably would have prevented the crash, Carpenter said. The technique essentially heats the sensors and evaporates any moisture before data calibrations. "This technique was never formalized in a technical order change or captured in 'lessons learned' reports. Hence, only some pilots and some maintenance technicians knew of the suggestion," according to Carpenter's executive summary of the accident. Oh wow, I drive a Stealth Suzuki Swift! It has a defog button that activates a heater too! The Spirit was delivered in February 1995 and expected to be in service for another 50 years. But then, they classified the existence of the "Defog button" and before long, nobody knew how to use it anymore... "It's fortunate the crew was able to safely eject. It's unfortunate, however, that we lost one of our nation's penetrating bombers," said Gen. Carrol H. Chandler, commander of Pacific Air Forces. I get the feeling he might as well have said "It's unfortunate, however, that we lost one of our nation's fucking bombers". There used to be a joke about the difference between our air force and some other countries air force is that our side breaks ground and flies into the wind but I guess now that a few steamy farts have sent one of our prized stealth bombers hurling out of the air like a stone, we can't tell that joke so smugly anymore. source
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| Thursday, 12-Jun-2008 | ||||
| 06/12/2008 16:26 | This was on sunsite back in 1996... A little reformatting and pasting in plaintext, since at present its only form on the net is stashed inside a tar.gz which makes it unsearchable and doesn't help anyone. unedited or corrected other than to remove 80-column formatting and remove underlined spellcheck problems, may contain hideous errors I made as a kid. -- Tracker is a relatively simple mod file program, you give it options and (a) filename(s) and voila, out of the sound port comes the sound. What could possibly be easier. On the other hand, some people might want a mod file player that takes advantage of a home stereo system with surround sound. I have modified the original mixing of tracker from sending odd channels to one side and even ones to the other. The current setup sends each channel to a different Dolby channel, via simple addition and subtraction. THEORY OF DOLBY SURROUND: Unlike prior attempts at multichannel sound (see note 1), the Dolby system of surround sound uses no special encoding scheme - and therefore there are no special requirements of most playback devices (see note 2), and nothing is lost except some spatial information if the sound is played back on standard equipment. This is true because the information for the rear channel is stored OUT OF PHASE in both the left and right channels. As it always has been, the "center" channel is a combination of left and right... to get at the information for the rear channel, one must simply compare the differences in amplitudes between the left and right channel. Often no special electronics are needed for "garage dolby"! (see note 3), but a cheapo "stereo expander" that amplifies stereo difference will help this setup greatly. Obviously, a "genuine" Dolby system has more than two amplifiers, eliminating such trickery as can be done to "steal" dolby data out of surround-encoded soundtracks. By seperating the signals prior to amplification, stereo seperation can be kept at 100% while simultaneously allowing for strong signal strength at the rear channel. Additionally, the rear channel is given some delay so that sounds wont be percieved as being out of phase and so the brain will have a chance to percieve correct directions first. WHAT ABOUT PRO-LOGIC: In Dolby Pro-Logic, another channel is introduced: the center channel. There is no difference in the encoding scheme, but the playback equipment does some special processing to ensure optimal seperation of the four channels. Specifically, once all four channels have been generated (LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER, and REAR) the Pro-Logic electronics look at the resulting amplitudes and determine what came from where. For example, if the right channel is at +1 volt, and the left channel is at 0 volts, the amplitudes for the four dolby channels would be: Left - 0 Right - +1 Center - -.5 (left-right)/2 Rear - +.5 (left+right)/2 In Dolby Pro-Logic, the system makes corrections so that the sound will only be heard from the left speaker. This is the sole purpose of the ProLogic system, and it makes a remarkable difference! NOTE 1: Anyone remember the term "Quadraphonic"? I sort of do: Although being a mere 21 years old I remember seeing the machines for "Quadraphonic" in thrift stores a decade ago. Now they arent even there (!)) NOTE 2: Some modern audio COMPRESSION routines will loose the phase data because instead of storing the waveform, they store data about the sounds frequency and amplitude. Audio stored in this way will have its rear component "folded" into the front half of the listening range :( NOTE 3: It is possible to get low-grade surround sound by wiring an amplifier to three speakers according to the diagram. One is well-advised to experiment with this combination, but use care not to overdrive the amplifier - an amplifier with a minimum impedence of 4 ohms is needed for a setup like this using 8 ohm speakers. Also note that ANY amplifier with a feature along the lines of "Independant Power Supplies" will NOT work with this setup as shown because it depends on a common ground. Almost all home systems have a single power supply, but many car stereo systems use independant power supplies.
______
| o _ |
| O (_)| LEFT
|______|
| | ______
LEFT (+)---+- / -----| o _ |
GROUND(-)-----< | O (_)| REAR
RIGHT (+)---+- \ -----|______|
_|__|_
| o _ |
| O (_)| RIGHT
|______|
Independant Power Supply adapter using transformers is as follows:
LEFT(+)-------$ $--------- LEFT(+)
$ $
LEFT(-)-------$ $--\
>----- GROUND
RIGHT(-)-------$ $--/
$ $
RIGHT(+)-------$ $--------- RIGHT(+)
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| Tuesday, 13-May-2008 | ||||
| 05/13/2008 10:34 | UNRY! Baby's first meaningful English word is hungry. He says "unry"/"unnee" when he really wants a breast. Saying hungry when he won't take breast has been a sure sign of a burp, and that he is in fact, still hungry and will have some just as soon as he is burped. He's three and a half months old.
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| Tuesday, 22-Apr-2008 | ||||
| 04/22/2008 21:30 | Uhhh... "Uhhh, it looks to me an awful lot like two sine waves on the horizontal sweep, and a vertical sweep that is almost exactly (but not quite!) three times too low in frequency to get the scope stable. Also, I found this when I was looking for math demos with music to watch with the baby. While your video was on, he took a huge shit in his diaper. I think he might be onto something." But some videos make the baby cry. The worst was when I was looking for old video games, usually videos with sounds that the baby enjoys, we found one with old mac games. In black and white. He cried, kicked, and screamed; those games really, truly sucked and even a 3 month old can tell. | |||
| Tuesday, 15-Apr-2008 | ||||
| 04/15/2008 21:40 | So, uh, I herd sum things... 
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| Sunday, 06-Apr-2008 | ||||
| 04/06/2008 00:29 | Oooh, ooh, I can has rifle now? calling dibs on Charlton Heston's rifle!
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| Friday, 21-Mar-2008 | ||||
| 03/21/2008 18:29 | c--
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| Monday, 28-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/28/2008 18:05 | 
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| Sunday, 27-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/27/2008 11:53 | Abandoned Spy Satelite signals changing times A 20 ton spy satellite is going to come crashing down to Earth Skylab-style tells me that the Department of Defense has I guess its kind of hard to justify the expense to fund obsoleted spy satellites when your program administrators just hit up Google Maps rather than doing the miles of paperwork necessary to use the thing. Still, it would have been nice if they could have at least picked the target for its crash landing... Above all else, I think this willingness to risk the technology falling into "enemy hands" means that the problem of looking thru layers of atmosphere from hundreds of miles away with ultra-high-precision telescopes has been rendered into a moot point by drone technology in a complete and total manner. I'd even suspect some US officials would just love if "the enemy", whatever the hell that may be, would waste the effort to develop its own spy satellites. Then, the USA would have something to shoot at besides people, a practice which has proven somewhat unpopular lately because it tends to turn any surviving family members into terrorists. EDIT TO ADD (20/FEB/2008): They decided to blow it up anyways. Reason given: fuel it contained.
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| Saturday, 26-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/26/2008 17:38 | Yesterday David flipped head-down, and Taryn has already lost her plug a few times, but babies bag of water hasn't broken yet according to the ultrasound done yesterday. I am so excited to be a Father!!! Taryn set up registries, and people have been getting things off of the registry for baby David. Quite a few things have already come, each time I'm amazed by the stuff at how small babies are. http://www.toysrus.com/ControllerServle http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/b I saw his hands on the ultrasound when her water was checked the other day. He appeared to be pointing at the transducer! Mood:  excited
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| Sunday, 20-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/20/2008 15:12 | Reunited by the Internet! I just got an email from Planned Parenthood. Apparently my cervix sent me an email! Poor thing must have been totally lost the last 30+ years, but thanks to the wonder of the internet, it was able to go into a PP office, and locate me online and send me an email. They say I should have it tested and vaccinated before I can take it home tho. I guess that makes sense, who knows where its been all these years, especially if its as liberal as I am.
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| Tuesday, 15-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/15/2008 13:01 | TB  Its a little strange. I've never owned a trillion of anything counted individually before. Edit To Add:The LaCie drive started out noisy, but now is making a sound similar to the high pitch of a leaf blower. This thing is, mechanically speaking, horrible. I wouldn't recommend anyone else purchase one for use in the home. The noises are enough to make me seriously question if anything stored on this drive will be available in a few years. ETA 2:Its not even really a TB hard disk. Its just two 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives connected a small circuit board that must just serve as a disk consolidator and Firewire 400/800 & USB adapter. So, I guess I never really had a hard disk with 1TB of space in the first place anyways. The problem? Cooling fan never comes on anymore and/or is burnt out. Haven't had the time to investigate further, other than to just be depressed about what a let-down this product has been. ETA 3:After taking apart, the cooling fan worked. But, slowly, and no idea what changed. Reassembly left it in this condition for quite some time. Eventually, the drive started overheating again. Took it apart once more, then, the fan stopped working again! Evidently whatever component LaCie decided was good enough for a thermal circuit didn't last for a lousy two months! "Hotwired" the fan into the 12V portion of the power supplied to the closer of the two Barracuda drives. This is the voltage specified on the fan itself. Used a dremel to remove the stylized obstructions from the fan outlet on the back, and some metal foil tape to form a miniature duct that effectively lined the fan up with its actual outlet - LaCie didn't even get that right, having mounted the fan about half a centimeter too far back and about a quarter centimeter too far to one side! Its a lot noisier now than when it was first turned on cold, but its staying cool, and all the noise comes from the little fan - which is still quieter but also a hell of a lot less annoying than the racket the thing put out after the drives overheated and started squeaking and clattering.
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| Monday, 14-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/14/2008 00:28 | Banner substitution code! LOL... webserver-based inteligent banner blocking with substitution: (Yahoo Mail web client shown)  This is the sort of thing you are treated to if you use my wireless LAN.... I've been doing pattern matching on the URLs in order to determine what size of what to show.
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| Tuesday, 08-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/08/2008 12:03 | Just Add Mudkip... for Instant Win Yesterday I got the nameserver / apache domain-blocking combo configured real good.. now, more or less, anytime someone loads a gif, png, or jpg from a blocked domain, an image of a mudkip is sent, but if they load some other random page its presumed to be a frameset, and I send my own HTML...  No Ads, Countersor Trackers for Me Keep the Internet Pleasant and Free! Today at one point I had 7 other people using it! All the ad-blocking has resulted in much better reliability for the router, also.
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| Sunday, 06-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/06/2008 15:59 | Because its a Macintosh? 
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| Tuesday, 01-Jan-2008 | ||||
| 01/01/2008 12:10 | Amazon.com is a neglected website They are offering me the chance to spend a little extra to make sure I get something shipped by December 22nd. Uh, its January 1st. I sure as fuck hope they can get just it here before March, let alone sometime in December. There is no excuse for this sort of insane fuckup in a computer system that ought to be capable of automatically ending offers like this when it is no longer feasible to actually provide them. The fact that they are still making this offer indicates to me that they probably offered it to people fraudulently at a time when people believed it just might be possible anyways...
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| Wednesday, 19-Dec-2007 | ||||
| 12/19/2007 18:25 | Sunspots, the Solar Cycle, and the Power Grid So they say the next sunspot cycle is starting, and the power grid is threatened if it ends up being a really intense one. Yeah but maybe not if we make a really simple correction to it first! Twisted pair, the "technology" that makes fast ethernet without interference possible, keeps what would be hideous crosstalk out of multi-trunk phone lines, and makes the modern CFL light bulb possible can help out here too. Geomagnetic storms on the sun overwhelm power grids because the wires are kept far apart for long distances, so they encircle a large area perpendicular to the sun; a magnetic pulse present across the entire area has the possibility to impart a very large amount of energy to that wire. With twisted pairs, the area between the wires is rotated; when the wires are on the other side, the net effect is cancellation of any induced currents because over a long area, half the time the currents are induced in exactly the opposite way as the other half. For the price of adding some length at each support pole, this can be accomplished by a retrofit. For whatever its worth, the amount of damage to the transmission lines caused by a single high-altitude nuclear strike would also be reduced for the same reason.
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| Saturday, 01-Dec-2007 | ||||
| 12/01/2007 20:37 | Tom LaSorda has head in sand? The companies backed an alternative of 32 mpg to 35 mpg by 2022. At the time, Chrysler LLC executive Tom LaSorda told employees the Senate bill would "add up to a staggering $6,700 — almost a 40 percent increase — to the cost of every Chrysler vehicle." Or, Chrystler, could, you know, make vehicles that aren't gas guzzlers. Last time I checked back around 2000, Chevy Metro was substantially cheaper than a Dodge Viper, right? So its not like the technology is expensive. Hell, I got 45-55MPG in a Chevy Sprint, on the road, half a decade ago, and that thing had a carburetor! You don't even need 1980s electronic fuel injection to make a 4-door car that gets good mileage, let alone any of this new hybrid vehicle stuff. According to an EPA study, the Toyota Prius has nothing on the old Chevy Sprint in terms of efficiency. If anything mandatory efficiency requirements ought to make vehicles cheaper, because it will compel automakers to be a little bit more reasonable in the design process. Hopefully. In Consumer Reports' real-world driving test, the Civic Hybrid averaged 26 mpg in the city, while the Toyota Prius averaged 35 mpg, much less than their respective EPA estimates of 47 and 60 mpg. Hybrid cars performed much closer to EPA estimates in Consumer Reports' highway tests. 26?!?!? LOL. Hope its fast! Looks like carrying around all those heavy batteries isn't as helpful as it was supposed to be.. our Civic gets better mileage than that!
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| Wednesday, 07-Nov-2007 | ||||
| 11/07/2007 19:58 | Google Calculator = Outsourced Crap? Type "1 atm in psi" 1 atm = 14.6959488 pounds per square inch OK, right! But before you try to actually DO anything with Google calculator... don't. It'll fuck you over completely when you least expect it. Here's one easily reproducible example of a rather This shows that at least Google still can handle basic arithmetic by dividing two identical things. (1 pound per square inch) / (1 pound per square inch) (1 pound per square inch) / (1 pound per square inch) = 1 It doesn't do so well when confronted with "asymmetrical per" in the equation. (1 pound / square inch) / (1 pound per square inch) ((1 pound) / (square inch)) / (1 pound per square inch) = 0.101971621 s2 / m (1 pound per square inch) / (1 pound / square inch) (1 pound per square inch) / ((1 pound) / (square inch)) = 9.80665 m / s2 <---Oh by the way that's 1 gravity Never in algebra, calculus, or physics did anyone ever mention anything about this secret meaning of the word "per". I think there was definitely some discussion of the fact that you could tell the difference between a computer dweeb and an engineer by if they knew that pounds were units of force, not mass, but none of that changes the fact that I'm not trying to convert into metric in the first place, so it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that some airhead at Google apparently decided to "debug" Google Calculator by checking for the units error mentioned above, then, throwing G at the problem. It seems "psi" and "pounds per square inch" match the test but "pounds / inch ^2" doesn't. Basically, Google is doing an advanced version of "If 2+2=5, then output 4" instead of fixing the problem at the source. Or at least providing consistency within the program. Google knows: 1 newton = 0.224808943 pounds force Here, some other, different dweeb decided to just add the word "force" to make it correct. Thats great, except that 1 atm = 14.6959488 pounds per square inch. If thats how it was going to be, then shouldn't the constant be 1 atm = 14.6959488 pounds force per square inch? Wonder how much of this is a product of GOOGLE OUTSOURCING to Indian (red-dot type) programmers?
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| Friday, 07-Sep-2007 | ||||
| 09/07/2007 15:12 | Ultrasound Teyu had an ultrasound today. The fetus is going to be a boy! So at least we know what his name is going to be now, David Joseph Kennerly. Mood:  giddy
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| Tuesday, 28-Aug-2007 | ||||
| 08/28/2007 19:35 | Tofu! I made real tofu the other night... from some ground up drywall (calcium sulfate) and soy milk, just like in Beijing! UPDATE: Video! http://youtube.com/watch?v=kt_WLLu1X30 http://pics.livejournal.com/acpizza/p
Mood:  giggly
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| Saturday, 18-Aug-2007 | ||||
| 08/18/2007 20:59 | Blocking Adblock users by.. blocking firefox? Why not try being SUBTLE Seriously misinformed attempts at preventing the viewing of a website due to blocking of advertisements.. by blocking all firefox users? Has anyone actually run into this practice? 1. I haven't run into anyone actually blocking me out because of using Firefox. I was searching blocks related to firefox to determine why a site requiring either Firefox or MSIE might be blocking SeaMonkey users and stumbled across this finding. 2. Last time I checked, Internet Explorer worked wonderfully with another piece of open source advertisement blocking software that is every bit as effective as adblock. Now that MSIE has tabbed browsing, perhaps these users will become more empowered rather than just switching to Firefox. 3. I've always advocated AdBlock, and never AdBlockPlus, because AdBlock doesn't - and can't - block text-only advertisements inserted into the HTML of the actual page being viewed. It only blocks other URLs from being loaded into a page, which is totally reasonable. 4. There are several simple techniques for locking out users who block ads, especially those who just download block lists rather than building their own block list, but for most websites, its far more important to block out other much more bandwidth-expensive leeches first. One website that features video news can have its ads blocked, but its rather a pain in the ass to do it (requires a technique I don't normally use to avoid detection) and often I just temporarily disable the ad blocker instead. Invariably, I get an ad for NetFlix. Which is something we already use at this household, so all it really does is waste my time anyways to be forced to see that ad. Advertisements are like food samples, in order produce the desired effect, they should be presented in a kind, meaningful manner that encourages consumption of the product. The proper response to someone using an ad-blocking technology is to make sure a text-only blurb that likely will not get blocked appears somewhere on the screen, so that if the user is indeed actually interested in such a product, they will seek the advertisement out! The improper response is to ram the ad down the users throat by making them suffer. Forcing users to disable their ad blocking software will also mean that instead of having a calm, meaningful web experience where they may read about and become interested in your product, they will instead be driven to distraction by blinking banners like "Click on the Blinking Turd to win a $20 Fertilizer Coupon at Joe's Hardware" If you have the technical savvy to block users based on browser or based on use of ad-blocking technology, you also have the chance to again insert your advertisement some other, less obtrusive way, hosted properly as text from the same domain as the page that its on (that may well link to an off site counter or a popup) that won't trigger the persons knee-jerk reaction to block that distraction, quick! and might result in an actual sale! TV people figured out over 20 years ago that the answer to the "VCR problem" was to ditch the absolutely horrid and intolerable talking-head ads of the 1970s and switch to something more interesting and viewable. The people behind the flashing banner ad should do the same, because that is a now dying medium for advertising to the more intelligent consumer.
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| Saturday, 04-Aug-2007 | ||||
| 08/04/2007 14:57 | DVD Jacket Thumbnails If open notepad and paste the following in then save the file as "dvdthumbs.reg" and click it open in Window's Registry Editor, then when you navigate to the "JACKET_P" folder found on some DVDs, if you choose "view by thumbnail" you will be able to see the DVD jacket thumbnails as thumbnails...
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| Wednesday, 18-Jul-2007 | ||||
| 07/18/2007 12:12 | They live on the mainland too... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTI332oO
Mood:  amused
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| Tuesday, 10-Jul-2007 | ||||
| 07/10/2007 21:55 | OMG MOAR MUDKIPS! BIGGER! SDTV rez! Still not in stereo tho :-( Does anyone know of a free hosting solution or even just an embeddable SWF player and converter really, that offers stereo audio for small segments of uploaded video? Photobucket (Fox, now, unfortunately) doesn't derez the video quite so badly as YouTube (Google), but it still seems to downmix the audio to mono.
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| Tuesday, 03-Jul-2007 | ||||
| 07/03/2007 23:18 | Impossible Manure Accident in Rockingham County 5 people -farmers- in rockingham county died in a pit. supposedly of methane generated from liquid cow manure... methane is far lighter than air and wouldn't accumulate that way. Is someone not seeing the whole picture (was there a murder? Another cause of instant death?), or is the media changing the details to miseducate the public - keep people from making deadly manure traps, whatever... I wanna know! Something clogged the drain. What was it? Did it release deadly gas of another type? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070704/ap_ BRIDGEWATER, Va. - Deadly methane gas emanating from a dairy farm's manure pit killed five people — a Mennonite farmer who climbed into the pit to unclog a pipe, and then, in frantic rescue attempts that failed, his wife, two young daughters and a farmhand. ADVERTISEMENT "They all climbed into the pit to help," Sheriff Donald Farley said. Farmers typically take pains to ventilate manure pits where methane often gathers. A family member questioned whether cattle feed could have trickled into the pit and accelerated the formation of the gas. "You cannot smell it, you cannot see it, but it's an instant kill," explained Dan Brubaker, a family friend who oversaw the construction of the pit decades earlier. Scott Showalter, 34, apparently was transferring manure from one small pit to a larger holding pond on Monday evening, the sheriff said. About once a week, waste is pumped from the roughly 9-foot-deep pit into a larger pond. When something clogged the drain, Showalter shimmied through the 4-foot opening into the enclosure, which is similar to an underground tank. He would have climbed down a ladder into about 18 inches of manure. "It was probably something he had done a hundred times," Farley said. "There was gas in there and he immediately succumbed." Believing Showalter had suffered a heart attack, police said, a farmhand followed him moments later and also passed out. That's when another farm worker alerted Showalter's wife, Phyillis. "The family took off to try to get him," said Sonny Layman, who rents a house on the farm. "Phyillis threw the phone out at me and asked me to dial 911." Layman instead followed her and two of the Showalter's four children. By the time he got to the pit a few feet away, "They were all gone, except Phyillis." Layman said he tried to pull the woman out of the pit but could not. She died, along with daughters Shayla, 11, and Christina, 9, and farmhand Amous Stoltzfus, 24. The Showalters' two surviving daughters were being cared for by family members. On Tuesday, a cousin of Scott Showalter's questioned whether runoff from a pile of brewer's grain had accelerated the formation of the gas. Scott Showalter had been using the grain to feed his cattle. "It rained, and some of it ran down into this holding pit, it fermented and made a toxic gas," said Bruce Good, who saw Showalter about once a week. Whether the victims suffocated from the fumes, drowned or died of another cause might never be known. No autopsies were planned, in part because investigators were satisfied that the deaths were accidental, the sheriff's office said. The deaths struck hard in this picturesque farming region dotted with red barns, gleaming silos and church steeples that peak above rolling fields. The Showalter clan is well known in the community where neighbors do each other's laundry. On Tuesday, friends tended to the family's animals. "The cows have to be milked twice a day, even in an ordeal like this," said Frank Showalter, Scott's great uncle, standing a few feet from where his relatives died. The Showalters milked 103 cows on their farm west of Harrisonburg in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. They belonged to a conservative Mennonite church whose members shun many of the trappings of modern society but drive cars, use telephones and, according to police, take modern farm-safety precautions. Fellow church members were in shock Tuesday, said the Rev. Nathan Horst, a Mennonite bishop. "We've never had a tragedy of this magnitude," he said. Stoltzfus had moved to Rockingham County from the Lancaster, Pa., area less than a year ago and was taking a class to join the church. "He was very full of life," Horst said. Doug Michael, a childhood friend of Scott's, described him as a dedicated farmer and a family man. "Scott was a very likable young man, very friendly, always going out of his way to help anyone who needed a hand," Michael said.
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| 07/03/2007 11:01 | more thoughts on cat litter: saturation, toxoplasmosis http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/paras Another general goal of this litter product is to prevent the spread of toxoplasmosis. Even the non-TiO2 enhanced silica helped with this simply by drying the turds out to very rapidly so they could be scooped in under a day after having been shit out. That could be an environmental benefit of this product, and the regular silica as well, because dessicated turds can be thrown away. Apparently, in California, Sea Otters are being infected by cat turds scooped and flushed. Leaves a question tho: How well does the silica perform this task in climates that are much, much soggier to start with? I've recently read reports of silica saturating in other climates when used as cat litter. Perhaps the heat from the ballast of the UV lamp can be recycled to prevent this saturation, as would the IR radiation from the sun when used as sun litter. The cat is an indoor-only cat anyways, and the walls have been foam-sealed so its not like I'm at all likely to be have any actual toxoplasmosis in my litterbox at any point, but given how extremely common this parasite is its an issue worth paying attention to. Also, apparently there are cultural implications to limiting the spread of toxoplasmosis to be considered.
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| Friday, 29-Jun-2007 | ||||
| 06/29/2007 05:56 | Getting the titanium dioxide into the little silica pellet So far, the most effective method seems to be the following: Grind the TiO2 with mortar & pestle if it has any chunks. Mix the powdered TiO2 with distilled water (tap water DID NOT work), about a tablespoon or so per liter, under sunlight or "black light". The TiO2 actually becomes more affectionate for water because of the light stimulation, but also blocks out the UV doing the stimulation from underneath, so this method won't scale simply to large vats... Then pour the milky TiO2/water mixture onto the pellets. Distilled water is necessary. Recently, it was explained to me that disolved ion causes TiO2 to form into larger particles around disolved ions, perhaps this is why? -a word of caution...- Oh yeah, while titanium dioxide is FDA-approved for use on the skin and for eating as a food coloring or even in pills, recent evidence suggests that it might promote lung problems if deliberately inhaled in large concentrations, so when the stuff dries out, avoid breathing the particles. I'm not sure how small of a particle is made by the act of mixing the TiO2 with water under black light, this might be regular dust, it might be very, very fine dust? Also, an FDA approval is something that can be revoked or modified as new research becomes available... Its also worth noting that silica (aka "sand"), which composes 75% of the earths crust, causes silicosis and even lung cancer if breathed. Basically, use some common sense here, its never a good idea to breathe any sort of dirt-like dust, regardless of if you are at a construction site, in a lab, or playing in a sand box - this is something everyone probably figured out as a kid, or we'd all be dead anyways, right? Just, whenever something is labeled "mostly harmless" by good people, some other bad people demand that their exploited workers not object to BREATHING it, then problems develop... BTW: This stuff still seems to make a lot less dust than regular cat litter...
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| Wednesday, 27-Jun-2007 | ||||
| 06/27/2007 10:31 | Titanium Dioxide Update and Links Links to things of interest about Titanium Dioxide: April 2007 http://www.asu.edu/news/stories/200 This research is very interesting to my product because it determines exactly how the stuff will be effecting the surface of the cat turds, and any dust that is generated from them. Before any proteins are completely oxidized, they are likely broken down into many small chunks. Feb 2007 A girl is worried that TiO2 particles might kill microorganisms in water. Forgetting for the moment that this was the goal all along for most of the human race, I guess I can see how this might be a bad thing for shallow pools of wastewater which might otherwise nourish young mosquito larvae.  "Sun Litter", my photocatalytic cat-litter. Eliminates smells. Lasts longer than regular silica spheres. A cat litter box that remains totally odorless for over a month (one 10lb cat), (excepting time periods up to about 5 minutes long right after the cat dumps a load, of course - the solids dry out fast, but not instantly.) It ain't pretty and its not going to save the world, but my girlfriend is pregnant and at least I don't have to get rid of the cat to avoid toxoplasmosis
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| Wednesday, 20-Jun-2007 | ||||
| 06/20/2007 22:08 | Goodbye Photobucket Fox bought photobucket. ...and http://photobucket.com/albums/v510/zaph
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| Sunday, 03-Jun-2007 | ||||
| 06/03/2007 15:11 |
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| Saturday, 02-Jun-2007 | ||||
| 06/02/2007 08:50 | Ebay Co-Domain hosting redirects again... I got a suspicious email this morning. I won't repost the original link, but for the purpose of illustration, I'll repost a variation: http://us.ebayobjects.com/2c;9739597;91 Holy fuck, the phishers sent me a link to http://{numbereddomain} and thats fucking obvious looking, but as it turns out the http can be omitted entirely, two slashes suffices nicely. Visually that doesn't stand out nearly as much since slashes, unlike the letters "http", appear in URLs all the time. DO NOT TRUST EBAYOBJECTS.COM LINKS EVEN THO IT IS A LEGITIMATE EBAY DOMAIN.
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| Monday, 28-May-2007 | ||||
| 05/28/2007 16:03 | Why can web media players load local AVI files? Why is Windows Media Player, enabled from the web, allowed to load AVI files from the local hard drive? That doesn't seem like the best of ideas, especially now that it has been enabled in Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla SeaMonkey. No specific issues known at the moment.
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| Sunday, 27-May-2007 | ||||
| 05/27/2007 00:30 | Is there any browser or XFree86 compatible solution that will automatically perform Romanization of Japanese character sets as described in the translation tables on Wikipedia? While there is no solution in sight for Chinese, such an option would make the experience of seeing Japanese characters much easier on the eyes in addition to giving American wax tadpole biters like me a chance to badly read Japanese out loud. I definitely think this should be an option, even if it results in occasional misinterpretation.
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| Thursday, 10-May-2007 | ||||
| 05/10/2007 19:48 | Cat Cleans Itself for a Very Long Time (640x480 25fps DivX,flv) Hit play. Hit pause. Wait until it loads then hit play again. (Method used: Calmly comb a reluctant but willing cats hair sideways using repeatedly moistened comb. Release cat. Film cat.)
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| Saturday, 14-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/14/2007 10:19 | Finally, an ad I didn't feel like blocking slips thru... It was a Yahoo Text ad (I leave those), but this time it had an icon, which I realize enables a critical part of the advertiser accounting practices, counting the views of a particular ad in a reliable manner. Don't overpay for flights. Tell us the cities you want to track, and we'll email you when airfares drop or rise between your favorite cities. Travel smarter with Yahoo! Travel's Best Fare Alerts. Right next to the ad is an image: http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/u Right next to the ad is this calm, peaceful little square, it doesn't blink or anything, in fact, I'm not even feeling compelled to block it, really, because it doesn't drive the optic nerve to distraction. I wish web advertising had been like this all along! I can actually read the web page I am trying to look at without feeling like someone trying to read War & Peace in a busy nightclub. This ad is not so hot its going to get peoples attention no matter what. But, this ad is COOL enough that I would have checked out the fares, but for the fact that I have absolutely zero faith that I can buy what I want anyways, FAA regulations mean you don't get to upgrade to the wing seats until you're basically there in person to testify that you can open the wing door to help in an emergency, and I am to long for regular airline seats, and first class is sorta out of the question, ya know? I would love to see this approach finally catch on, and I hope the people who are doing it keep the cool ads separate somewhere, or a domain comes around somewhere that hosts only these cool ads (non animated icons, colors somewhat match, accompanied by text ads) exclusively, so I could even go so far as to whitelist it. Mood:  content
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| Friday, 13-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/13/2007 13:22 | Can't find a Daewoo RM269 (30902CN) Magnetron Would you trust wine advice from someone who advocates cooling it in a ... microwave oven? MagicChef's EW13F1ST is on the BottledWineGuide.com's list as "EWave Wine Cooler". Magic Chef makes the EWave microwave, and some damned nice beverage cooling refrigerators, but I can't say I've ever made the mistake of mixing up my MCBC580DBT beverage cooler with my Microwave, which I finally managed to abuse past the point of no return by microwaving pieces of wet plaster without the protective spinning dish inside (Yeah, totally my bad..) Finding a replacement magnetron is proving harder than expected. Probably because they are a fairly new design and otherwise pretty bulletproof, and have an 8 year warranty, which means the market isn't exactly flooded with replacement parts. The actual magnetron tube says "DAEWOO RM269 30902CN JF". Its from Korea. No, I'm not willing to give up the stainless steel design. I am presently considering putting a junker 800W unit in there (along with matching coil, diode, etc) but that means none of the convenience buttons will be right, and I'll have to give up my 30-second instant minute.
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| Wednesday, 11-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/11/2007 10:41 | Oh Noes! Microsoft Agent Could Allow Remote Code Execution Uh oh!  • In a Web-based attack scenario, an attacker would have to host a Web site that contains a Web page with a specially crafted Microsoft Agent that is used to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker would have no way to force users to visit a specially crafted Web site. Instead, an attacker would have to convince them to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link or view an image that takes them to the attacker's Web site. • An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. I always knew a Golden Retriever made a bad guard dog, but they're just so adorable!
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| Tuesday, 10-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/10/2007 01:59 |
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| Monday, 09-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/09/2007 11:08 | Academic Profiteering still works like a Porno Website at Google i dont feel like finding anything at the moment because I do not wish to filter thru privately-hosted articles that cost $20-$50 a piece, and Google's "search only free results" is hideously broken in that it searches only content that is explicitly licensed as free, when what I really want to do is search content that is not explicitly marked as for sale only, unless you are Google bot. "Eliminate non-cacheable results from search" is the option that Google needs and hasn't given us.
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| Sunday, 08-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/08/2007 14:21 | But What are Elephant Brains GOOD for? Only a very few animals have brains larger than we homo sapiens. The reason for this is pretty simple, brain tissue is expensive stuff, it eats a lot of calories just to keep it going. If the inteligence isn't being used, evolution will usually work towards getting rid of the unnecessary capacity. Bottlenose Dophins have somewhat larger brains than human beings, and it is very clear what they are used for. The Bottlenose has an absolutely amazing ability to process sound into three-dimentional constructs, and recently its been suggested that the chirps they make to communicate with each other may be less like words and more like pictures. Imagine being able to open your mouth, and spit out a short YouTube video or a JPEG. This is a relatively computationally intensive task, and you can see how the dolphins brain has buldgy lobes on either side where all this organic computing takes place. Elephants, on the other hand, while being well known for inteligence and all the good and evil doings alike that come with it, don't seem to have any absolutely amazing brain-based capabilities that dramatically exceed those of human beings, or even the capabilities of the great apes. Yet they have these absolutely monsterous brains, twice the size of a humans. Beyond that, unlike the dolphin they have a trunk that can do things - even things no human can do with opposable thumb-enabled hands alone. So... what gives? Humanity has been marvelling at how smart the elephant is compared to other domesticatable animals for so long, that we haven't asked the more important question: "Gee, compared to both humans and bottlenose dolphins, why are elephants so goddamned stupid?" The best answer I can think of so far is that an elephants brain may be bulky with redundancy so that it is able to retain its animal inteligence thru repeated, even deliberate (like ramming), cranial abuse, perhaps even skull fractures. This is unlike the quite delicate human head and brain. A humans brain is easily damaged even without breaking the skull, simply from being shaken around inside the skull, as is seen in shaken baby syndrome.
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| Saturday, 07-Apr-2007 | ||||
| 04/07/2007 10:36 | Mr Clean's Dead Pets Society Among other things, melamine has been found in recalled deadly pet food. Thats the stuff that those new so-called "magic sponges" are made from. I blame lazy workers using those fucking "Magic Sponges" to clean the inside of the mixing equipment between batches, instead of scrubbing it down with brute force, a washcloth, and tap water like they should have. Those goddamned things leave a filthy film of something on everything they touch, its quite disturbing because the way they were hyped up, you'd think they got the seal-of-approval from The Monk himself or something. Not only that, they fall apart as they are used, leaving little pieces of death everywhere. Don't get me wrong, they are still grrrreat for cleaning off industrial stuff, like taking the red printing ink off of aluminum backing tape, but they probably shouldn't be used as regular household cleaning products, because, well, they coat everything with a mildly toxic layer of shit.
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| 04/07/2007 01:24 | Spring 2007 issue of 2600 is available now The Spring 2007 issue of 2600 has been released, and I am looking forward to seeing what other wholesome goodness await within. Music: AE - I did it fo tha lulz
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| Wednesday, 07-Mar-2007 | ||||
| 03/07/2007 15:31 | Sweet! I would like to thank ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} revmischa and the staff of LiveJournal for the most excellent upgrade to a permanent account! | |||
| Saturday, 24-Feb-2007 | ||||
| 02/24/2007 10:23 | New Things I Made "Sun Litter" is a form of silica-based cat litter that works exactly like regular silica and oxygen based cat litter, except that a small particle of titanium dioxide is fused to each litter pearl, such that the cat pan can be scooped, rinsed with hose, and then allowed to sit in the sun to dry. Solar radiation powers a reaction that liberates oxygen from water, eventually catalytically oxidizing the remaining organics trapped within the litter pearls. I am also working on developing a system of evaporative cooling that uses no fans, similar to the Dogon Toguna, but relying on a silica and titanium dioxide evaporative medium that will serve a dual purpose of also cleaning the air that flows thru the unit, as well as preventing growth in the cooler media and coolant, but haven't actually finished and fully tested a prototype yet (the clay is setting...)
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| Saturday, 17-Feb-2007 | ||||
| 02/17/2007 22:46 | Hmmm I updated the entry on the Dogon Toguna as a Catabatic Evaporative Cooler again (edit 3), adding yet more information... Is social change and equality really something that can be brought about by an engineered product? Probably not, but the photocatalytic "logs" I describe would probably improve the lives and health of the male children and adult males who do sit under the Toguna nonetheless. But it is possible, it has happened before, consider effects what the discovery of the actions of female hormones, and the resulting purification or synthesis of products based on them has had on western society. Yeah - some good - some bad. All change is like that tho. -- An adaptation of the structure I describe, if the photocatalytic sterilization effect works to make the structure safe for even immunocompromized western citizens (for example, AIDS-infected people), would also have the desirable property of eliminating smog that passed thru it as well, making it an excellent addition to existing bus stop routes. If supplied with running water from the city mains, many design efficiencies become possible due to the lack of need to store a season's worth of water inside the cooler itself. If supplied with forced air, even more design efficiencies become possible, although consuming both electricity and water from the mains to run such a device would make it effectively identical to a modern swamp cooler, with the possible exception of a better cleaning effect on the air. Furthermore, the design efficiencies brought about by use of forced air include dramatic reduction of the surface area of the exposed photocatalyst, which may or may not dramatically reduce its effectiveness at cleaning the air or even the water flowing thru it - I do not currently know if the UV and light exposure, or the availablity of water and oxygen, is the rate-limiting factor in the photocatalytic reaction, but with most processes that use sunlight, surface area is the primary factor. Care should probably be taken to not contaminate the titanium photocatalyst with byproducts of hard water, as my observations of the action of hard water in silica show that the calcium tends to deposit around the edges of the silica, eventually blocking it off. It is unknown if enough nitrate ion would be produced from photocatalytic processes to wash away any deposited calcium, but considering the hardness of Arizona water, I very seriously doubt it. Sodium ions present no such problem, in fact, sodium is so good at moving thru silica that when glass is manufactured, if the manufacturer of the glass doesn't add enough calcium, the sodium will eventually disolve back out of the glass, leaving a flaky, opaque, and weakened glass behind - there is no need for expensive reverse osmosis, simple water-softening should suffice.
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