Small Fish, Big Pond

Even though it may never happen I think this is a great idea to help tie the western US a little closer together. Infrastructurist links a story thatmany metropolitan centers in the intermountain west are beginning initial studies for highspeed rail lines.

While in Japan I was amazed at how quick and efficient the Target=blank>bullet train (Shinkansen) system was. Of course having a rail pass that gave me the ability to get a ticket and go at anytime without worry of the price was a big plus but the ability to be anywhere I wanted in the country within just a couple hours was liberating. On a whim I went to a concert in Osaka during my Tokyo stay; it didn’t require much rescheduling since I could walk into station and be 515km away in less than 3 hours.

For more local comparisons that is the equivalent of traveling from here in Salt Lake City, to Las Vegas (580km) in about 3 hours.

By car that same trip takes 6-7 hours if you go legally, 5 if you go at 120mph (through mountains and winter snow). I flew to Las Vegas from SLC and factoring in typical airport delays along with flight time it also took 3 hours so really the time by train or air is the same between here and there.

SLC to Los Angeles is about double the distance. My cousins are in LA and when we visited them we’d drive 12 hours down there; basically leaving in the morning and arriving that night. Via bullet train we could eat an early breakfast in SLC, and be having lunch in LA, then be back to SLC in time for dinner.

Plus travel by bullet train is more comfortable since you get decent leg room and much more visually stimulating since you can actually see things as you pass rather than just the tops of clouds. But the main thing that caught my eye was an advertisement for the new N700 trains. Bullet trains are electric and the N700 uses 15% the amount of fossil fuels (or carbon output, my Japanese is limited) for the same Tokyo to Osaka trip.

That’s not 15% LESS, it’s 15% OF or in other words 85% reduction. In today’s “Green” world that is a nearly unobtainable goal in carbon reduction. And the trade off isn’t bad at all, a slightly slower transport but a much more enjoyable transport as well. The 15% carbon is still coming from something but since the trains are electric it’s entirely possible to use alternative electricity sources and lower that number further. After all its alt easier to squeeze the most efficient energy out of hydrocarbons at a plant rather than in an internal combustion engine in the train.

The only problem I can see is there are less populated cities across the west. The Tokaido line from Tokyo to Osaka passes through other huge cities such as Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kyoto. With a comparable distance Salt Lake to Las Vegas line the biggest cites passed would be Provo, and St. George. Obviously long distance commuter traffic will be much less, but of course running less trains isn’t hard at all. The planes only travel one or twice a day, with 15% energy reduction running three trains a day would still be more efficient per day. Plus as with Japan you can also run freight trains on the tracks in between bullet trains, although I’d hope that the US would change it’s rail policy and give passengers priority over freight.

Running from SLC to Denver could be complicated (but doable) by the Rocky Mountains but SLC to Vegas would be cake. Run it down past Provo, you could even run it on piers along the edge of Utah lake to keep from running through residential neighborhoods. Past Nephi run it out to Delta, besides connecting the most remote large city in the state it’s also the site of the power plant that powers much of the west from Salt Lake to Los Angeles and a perfect place to tap power for the electric bullet train. Then head south through Cedar City, St. George, and finally the straightaway to Las Vegas. Most land is relatively flat scrubland, and there are plenty of open places for wind farms to supplement the juice powering the rail line.

Another line heading west could pass Wendover, head to Reno then punch through the Sierra Nevada into Sacramento before ending in San Francisco.

I really hope that the future sees high speed mass transit lines tying the western cities a little closer together. Besides being a greener way to travel they could revitalize trade between western metropolises and boost usually remote cities the same way key refueling points on the transcontinental railroad did a century ago.

After listening to Glen Beck talk about global warming conspiracy theory watch this video as a counter-point.
In the end draw you own opinion.

If there was any one thing I learned through my years in college chemistry and physics classes is that science is incredibly complex. The the level we work with it we’re getting the most boiled down simplified interpretations. For the scientists doing research there is so much data that you have to be a lifelong researcher to truly understand a concept. certainly more than you can learn by watching a 10 minute talking head segment on Fox News or reading an article in the newspaper.

I don’t know alot; but I do know enough that two sentences taken out of context in 13 years worth of email chains isn’t enough to form any kind of opinion, especially without doing to research to at least try to put those sentences into context.

One thing that bugs me that I’ve heard alot in conservative Utah now that it’s winter is the comment that alludes to snowing as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. Even if you deny global warming, do yourself a favor and don’t assume global global temperature and local air temperature are the same. If makes you look like an idiot and negates you as a person with an informed opinion. Do some research and find real evidence global warming is flase (climate scientists would probably pay you if you found valid evidence!)

Besides gambling and overpriced shows Vegas is famous for their all you can eat buffets (among other things). Let’s imagine for a moment you’re at a buffet and you eat until you’re full, but a guy sitting next to you eats 4 times as much before he stops. Would you feel slighted that he somehow cut in on your share? You had all you wanted, he had all he wanted, and you both paid the same amount, were you slighted because his consumption was more than yours?

How about the buffet owners? If they still have so much food left over after you and your partner ate your fill they have to throw it out were they slighted by his high consumption?

The big question being is did he “hog” all the food? Personally I’m kind of an efficiency junkie so my answer is no, he got what he needed without negatively impacting anybody else. The only loss here was the providers overabundance of food, perhaps an overcalculation on their part but this way all their customers were happy.

You may be wondering what this has to do with technology but Benoît Felten has pointed out the same thing, except in the definition of a”bandwidth hog” on the internet. ISPs are claiming that bandwidth hogs take more than their fair share of bandwidth at the expense of others, this way people who use too much can be charged more. But if you pay for all you can eat and the provider has bandwidth to spare are you a hog or just making use of excess bandwidth?

Benoît is challenging the ISPs to prove that bandwidth hogs are a problem. (follow up here).

I can’t directly answer Benoît’s challenge but as I work for an ISP, in the cloud, where all the backend bandwidth lies and I can tell you with some hands on experience that at least on our network bandwidth hogs are not a problem and doesn’t create noticeable impact on the network users.

But before shouting the inevitable “Aaah HA!” to ISPs for lying to us for their own profit, bandwidth hogs DO impact the network at peak times, just not noticeably or in the way we would expect. You see we create complex Cost of Service rules across all the routers in the cloud that guarantees our customers have X amount of bandwidth minimum based off what they pay, and then Y amount of excess bandwidth if its available. This creates more of a flow change during peak times rather than a roadblock. Most people think of network congestion the same way they do a traffic jam. If one big semi is taking up most of the road the smaller cars get crowded behind it and soon you’re 20 minutes late to work because traffic came to a halt.

Network congestion doesn’t work like that.

When traffic starts to fill up the available bandwidth (traffic lanes in the above analogy) traffic doesn’t bunch up behind the heavy data streams (semis) instead the bandwidth is narrowed down. So the cars don’t bunch up behind the semi, the semi is made skinnier and longer taking up less bandwidth but over a longer period of time. In this way if somebody is streaming a hulu video and using up all the bandwidth, your mission critical email won’t be blocked all traffic will just be stretched out a bit and the email will take a bit longer to send. However considering that web traffic and emails are fractions of a fraction the size of a high def web stream even a doubling of the time taken to send it will be virtually un-noticeable. We’re talking about 60ms to load to 120ms to load.

The bigger the file transfer the more noticeable the change, so the only people who will have a noticeable impact on performance are those people who are hogging the most bandwidth.

And in real life production it’s amazing watching the latency change as we grant that guaranteed amount of bandwidth instead of just having a company use the excess bandwidth. At first a new router is just using the excess bandwidth on the cloud which may be very minimal at peak times. As soon as they’re Cost of Service and Committed Information Rates are integrated into the bandwidth there is a very noticeable change is transfer speeds.

The amount of bandwidth being on the cloud used is usually quite high simply because people are using up the excess (thus less lines are “dark” or under utilized) so sites that don’t have their guaranteed COS values set have a hard time competing with sites that have guaranteed speeds+the excess. Thus a site with no COS may get 40% of their max circuit speeds, once they’re integrated with everybody else that usually bounces up above 90%. It’s only the rare time that EVERYBODY maxes out their connections and speeds drop across the board to the guaranteed speeds (usually around 75% of the circuit capability).

Another good comparison is the planned state of the “smart” electric grid which is basically going to work as out internet does now. By monitoring data flow all across the net high congestion times can be rate limited a few percentage points to smooth out the bursts of data. There is an impact to users but the less data needed the less noticeable the impact, a page that takes 1 second to download will still seem about the same if it takes 1.2 seconds to download.

So bandwidth hogs do exist and at the same time their use a a term by the ISPs are a concoction to get more money.

Businesses have been living under this model for decades, and users have been to but it’s only recently we’re regularly using enough bandwidth that we’re starting to notice our impact. In the future we will probably see terms such as “Guaranteed Class of Service” and “Committed Information Rates” show up more in consumer internet plans, although I hope they use terminology that it’s easier for consumers to understand. But it’s best now if you start to erase from your mind the idea that you purchased a 5mbps connection cable and that you’re guaranteed to be able to use that at full throttle all the time.

At the same time be aware that data plans that are tiered by total bandwidth used is just a marketing way that companies can dig more out of heavy users. The solution that I hope we see in the future is simply the way corporate connections go, and that is that you pay for a line capable of X bandwidth, with a guarantee of Y bandwidth.

via ars

1024 digital tracks are worth $0.23 according to Time Warner

Reel Big Fish – Sell Out (Official Music Video)

Want to know why I feel no guilt watching big labels bleed a slow death, read this great article from an un-recouped band trying to find out how much money they’re making.
It’s a bit long for a “quick” read but it’s great, and as you’re reading keep in mind this is one of the numerous “little guys” once embraced by the corporation that is now discarded by the wayside. And one of the few who has the abilities to see just how bad their getting screwed.

As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: “We don’t normally do this for unrecouped bands,” he said. “But, I was told you’d asked.

Time Warner is the 4th largest media conglomerate. They aren’t a mom and pops startup business in danger of dying so that they have to cut costs to stay afloat. Just a few of TW’s lucrative holdings:
New Line Cinema (Makers of Lord of the Rings Trilogy)
Time Inc.
HBO
Turner Broadcasting System
Warner Bros. Entertainment (All Harry Potters, Batmans, and Supermans)
Cartoon Network
Adult Swim
CNN (The “Not Fox or that crappy MSNBC” one)
DC Comics (And all the comic book movie moneys they bring)

My point is a company this big an powerful has the ability to do basic accounting of where their money is coming and going; something they are all too quick to point out to say that illegal downloads of music and movies is apparently killing them.

Making money is making money, it doesn’t matter if you’re up $20,000, or in the hole $300,000 income is just as important. The fact that record labels dismiss the income (debt reduction) owed on artists that are un-recouped is just bad as if they cut a recouped band out of a $10,000 royalty check. The artists aren’t suffering because of downloads like the labels say, they’re suffering because the labels are lying to them and cutting them out of the income they are entitled to.

Alternatively we have proof here that the big labels aren’t losing hardly any money on digital downloads at all. If 1,016 plays of a track on MySpace is only worth 23 cents, why are illegal downloaders being fined $80,000 for downloading a digital copy off the internet?

Either way you slice it the conglomerate labels are lying and exploiting their artists and customers.

Via Giz

The gains in the last week have been almost too rapid that I think we’ll still see days below 8500 in the future. But like I said this is far better than I think anybody could have hoped for at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately the real world we live in feels the fallout longer than the market so even if we jump to 10,000 by Christmas (could you imagine!!) then it will still take a year or so for the real world to stabilize under the highs of Wall Street.

It’s funny that I hear people now saying that with the market at 9000 already that it’s proof that the stimulus bills were unneeded. Um… I think the reason it’s this high already is BECAUSE OF the stimulus bills; this is exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it better and faster than we thought they would.

That was me in July. Today the DOW broke 10,000 (hasn’t closed yet so I don’t know if it will last the day). All I can say is that from a financial perspective I’m loving it. In May I calculated that if the DOW had stopped at 8000 my 401k would have generally fully recovered in August of this year, every point beyond has just been multiplying my gains.

I never though we’d recover to 10k within the year, let alone by October. Now if we could just get businesses to calm down and start hiring again we’ll be good.

Technically the market hasn’t really done anything ground breaking today, 10000 is an arbitrary number, the real big events occurred in March and July, and today is no different than the last couple months of growth. The point is that it’s a generally steady rise upward to this point which is good.

On the otherhand if you’ve been planning on investing to take advantage of the low market the door is closing; it can’t go up forever and the real time to jump onboard was the first half of this year. Still it’s good to invest over long periods anyway; so there’s no reason to wait before re-investing in the market (my co-workers think this is crazy and that Obamma is going to destroy the market and the country in the next year or so, but I work in the reddest area of the reddest state). If you haven’t felt confident about the market in over a year now is the time to get your feet wet again.

This is all very reassuring news that the economy has more bright days ahead of it than dark.

Super awesome future cities to colonize the desert!

I came up with that headline, and I think it should be name of the program that the US creates to get this happening (and the name of the first city). The article focuses on water conservation but I just think it would be a great way to make human habitation in the extreme locals that make up a major portion of the earth the most efficient and enjoyable it can be.

I love stuff like this. Back in the 1950’s and 60’s America dreamed that by the new millennium this type of future would exist. Then our generation dropped the ball and focused on more glut, less tech. A few people have kept alive the dream but that’s all anybody thinks of it anymore… a dream.

We have the technology to make stuff like this happen, the benefits and utility savings of a city built like this are well understood. I know first hand how hydroponic farming can maximize food output with restricted space and resources. The issue of equipment micromanaging a micro climate like this may have been a stumbling block in the past, but the computers of today would make it a piece of cake. Paolo Soleri and people who have followed his footsteps have explored Arcology concepts that maximize the efficient use of area while maximizing the feel of open space.

Seriously, we should jump on this now while it’s easy. If movies have taught me anything it’s that we need to build futuristic worlds now so when the world is packed with our fast reproducing moron offspring, they’ll have a world that can sustain them.

Idiocracy – Opening Sequence – Free videos are just a click away

Hat tip Gizmodo. And it’s more Logan’s Run than Dune.

This used to be a political blog so here is a perfect mesh of past and present.

Today the head of the FCC announced that they’re moving to guaranty the internet stays free and competitive from now on. FCC Chairman wants network neutrality, wired and wireless
To do this it will require laws that guarantee certain freedoms for people on the internet. These laws may restrict the way businesses take advantage of consumersdo business; in much the same way labor laws took away a businesses right to employ 8 year-olds for 60 hour work weeks.

The idea of a law against business has got Republican attention and now Republicans are moving to block the new FCC online freedom initiative by removing all the funding for it to be implemented. In their own words:

“In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation,” Ensign said in a statement. “We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now.”

These are the businesses that “thrive” by charging you $100 a month for phone service that doesn’t work. By charging you more per kilobyte for an SMS than it costs NASA to communicate with the Hubble space telescope. By promising to “innovate” and upgrade your service over a decade but instead charging you more per month for the same service.

This is an example of jackass Republicans letting partisan bickering block good legislation all without them knowing what or why they’re blocking it. These FCC initiatives don’t “limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want.” They stop companies from blocking what customers want. It keeps the internet free so that huge corporations don’t stifle the innovation that created the internet in the first place.

Because if laws that guarantee freedom stifle businesses, then those businesses are doing something they shouldn’t.

The new FCC network Neutrality regulation is a regulation the same way the First Amendment is a regulation. Guaranteeing people have freedom to do what they want may mean we have to force business NOT to restrict our freedom. The government is just passing legislation so that our modern Corporatocracy doesn’t become a “Big Brother” influence that defines how and when we communicate over the internet.

To put it in perspective, if free speech was billed by corporations when the founding fathers came up with the Bill of Rights these morons would be fighting it saying that government regulation will kill all the businesses that make money enforcing silence among the populace.

Bottom line:
Today the FCC made the first announcement that it’s going to keep the internet free (communication-wise, not $$$), competitive, and non-discriminatory.
Republicans are moving to stop this, and in the process rejecting everything they claim defines their party.

By giving monopoly businesses power rather than the consumer they are creating an environment that:
1. Squashes free communication
2. Closes the free market
3, Blocks access to today’s modern communication utility
4. And restricts the innovation that has allowed to internet to redefine communications in our time.

It may sound like I’m blowing this out of proportion but all of the above have already happened at least once as the big communication providers have tried to “cross the line” to turn a profit. I hope to hell that the republicans are only doing this as a knee-jerk “fight the democrats” reaction and not because they truly believe that corporate America should have to power to define and limit how American citizens freely communicate online.

Update: It was. Yay for internet, boo for the USA’s failing government.

Simply put, Japan’s attitudes to copyright are baffling.

The news via Ars is that “Japanese RIAA wants server-side music DRM for mobile phones.”
So anytime you listen to music on your phone it checks online with a central repository to see if you have the rights to play the song.

It’s mind blowing on so many levels.

First is the gall of any organization to try to pull this. Second is the massive amount of backend resources to log everybody’s DRM rights. And third the huge potential for failure rendering everybody’s legally purchased music worthless. Even though it’s not addressed I’m going to assume they’re smart enough to ignore tracks ripped from legally purchased CD and played on mobile phones. Otherwise multiply the audaciousness of the above list tenfold.

But what really interests me is how this speaks of the differences between culture in Japan and the US.

That there is even a possibility for RIAJ to suggest this speaks volumes about Japanese culture and the adage “The nail that sticks up is the first to be hammered down.” RIAA in the US would love this kind of thing but they know that the public would eviscerate them the moment they even hint at it as a possibility. In Japan I still don’t think they’ll allow it but nationally people are submissive enough towards authority that it actually makes it on the table. “If it’s the law follow it and change it through low pressure means, don’t make waves.”

Next is the incredibly lax copyright respect given to western music on TV and Japanese media. Watch Japanese TV for 20 minutes and you’ll hear a few music clips from western music; watch another 20 minutes and you’ll hear clips played by bands that most definitely did not give permission for the show to play their music. In the US copyright lawyers start circling the waters if you play as small as a three cord riff from a popular song (which speaks volumes of US propensity to litigate). However I think there may be a copyright law that says that you can sample on TV so long as it’s less than 30 seconds, or maybe that only applies to covering another artist’s works. Either way a lot of indie bands get a lot of uncompensated play in Japan.

Another oddity is the fact that piracy in Japan is so much less of a problem than it is in the US. While it’s not non-existent, Japanese people are generally much less inclined to illegally download music. Which is amazing considering how overpriced the music is brand new: $10 for singles, $20 for albums, $30-40 for limited edition albums!
Possibly tempering this is the fact that Japanese youth are less PC oriented and more Mobile Phone savvy. That keeps the act of running torrent servers more in the realm of the tech geeks rather than the everyday Japanese youth. So why in the world would the RIAJ think of such a restrictive process for controlling music?

But the real mind boggler is the fact that even though few people pirate music, when it does happen it’s quite blatant. In Japan they have DVD rental shops just like in the US, but in Japan they also have CDs for rent at the shops. It’s a prime place to get exposure for all the latest releases and will always have new hits the day they drop.

Ok that’s no so shocking but the kicker is that in additional to all your DVD and CD renting needs, the shops also sell all the blank CD, DVD, and MiniDisc’s that you need.

Put two and two together. It’s like one stop shopping for the CD ripping pirate. The icing on the cake is that they have hourly rentals, just enough time to go home, rip, and come back. I took a picture when I was there to prove it because I just couldn’t believe the audacity.

(Sorry the picture is a bit clandestine, I thought I might get in trouble for taking it).

For more check out this interesting article about why RIAJ looks the other way over CD Rental ripping.

So why, with all things considered, is RIAJ thinking of such a draconian scheme as locking down all digital music copies on Mobile Phones?

British Petroleum made a new oil discovery while breaking the world record for deepest well. New technology has allowed currently unreachable parts of the ocean depths to be tapped.

Already a lot of my conservative friends are pointing out that this proves “New Oil” will always be available and thus the world will never run out (we’ve had this argument before). So here’s some basics I picked up in college geology to put oil in perspective and hopefully open a few eyes.

The problem is that it takes very specific circumstances for oil to be created and trapped where it can wait to be discovered by us.

Issue 1 – Time

It takes time to create oil; coal, it’s called a “Fossil Fuel” for a reason. Oil is basically prehistoric algae, trapped under sediments, and heated to become oil or natural gas (plant and animal material generally turns to coal). Most oil is generally understood to have been algae that was buried between 200 and 400 million years ago. The problem is 2/3 the earth’s surface is 300 million years old or younger, most is less than 100 million years old.

Source: National Geophysical Data Center

The ocean floor is a constantly shifting mass of dense rock that comes up in the ocean rifts, and spreads across the ocean before plunging back under the continents. Average time spent crossing is about 150 million years. So even if algae is quickly deposited in the center of the ocean, buried under sediment (see next problem), and heated at the right temperature, it’s barely becoming oil when it’s plunged back under the continental shelves.

So oil will only exist in places where geology is relatively slow and the rocks are old; like on continents, continental shelves, or pockets of the ocean that aren’t actively being sucked under the continents (like the gulf of Mexico). Most of the ocean floor doesn’t have a possibility of oil even if we could reach it.

The algae needs to be trapped in an anaerobic environment so that decomposition won’t occur; then buried under sediment until the pressure and heat can convert it to oil. This doesn’t always happen; in fact if our current natural world is any guide, it’s kind of rare. Not to mention that when it does happen it still takes time for enough sediment to pile on top till the algae is deep enough the pressure and heat can convert it. So again, even though it takes about 10 million years to naturally convert, the time to be buried, heated, and converted takes 200-400 million years.

Issue 2 – Escaping the ground on it’s own.

Once the algae becomes oil it has another problem, if the rock above is porous the oil will seep up to the surface. Remember oil is lighter than water and rock, as water seeps down cracks in the ground it displaces oil and forces it to the surface. Once up it is broken down in a natural reaction by heat and organisms at the surface.

In southern Utah as a kid I remember coming across crack in the rock that had tar squeezing out from in between. This is deep in nationally protected areas, miles away from any roads. At first I wondered why people sealed a crack in the desert with tar, then I realized it must be natural tar, now I know it’s natural petroleum products seeping to the surface and breaking down in the heat.

So for oil to survive it needs to be trapped into a reservoir capped with non-porous rock until somebody drills through the rock and it can squirt up the well.

Issue 3- Oil quality

Sounds funny but not all petroleum is created equal. Saudi Crude Oil is of such a high quality it’s almost already refined and ready for use. Other forms of petroleum can be so poor that at room temperature it solidifies to a waxy texture or in a state that additional energy needs to be added to extract it from the Kerogen and get a small amount of crude oil with a large amount of waste product. And all oil may be mixed with a contaminant like sand they need to be separated from before refinement. So even if you find a deposit of oil shale or oil sands that have oil in them, the cost of extraction is often prohibitively expensive. Back in the 1980 oil companies actually abandoned oil production through oil shale because it wasn’t economically feasible. The fact they’re returning to the oil shale now gives an idea how desperate they are for new oil sources.

This is all very relevant because the energy cost to create 1 Killowatt hour of electricity through renewable methods like solar energy is eight times that of producing the same amount with oil. Currently most people consider that to be excessively high but oil extraction from oil shale or oil sands can be 10-30 times more expensive than regular oil extraction from wells. So when compared to oil from oil shale, The total price per kilowatt including manufacturing and production, solar power production will actually become the economical alternative.

And all of this of course also ignores the ecological factors that the machinery excavating oil shale burns about the same amount diesel that they get from oil they extract, a 3 to 1 ratio of water and additional chemicals to oil is needed for each barrel of crude produced, and a lot of chemical waste is produced during extraction.

Issue 4 – Finding places that haven’t already been found

Knowing what we know above you can predict where oil will be; certain conditions can be met so by looking at the geology of an area you can tell if it’s old enough to have oil, if it’s been heated enough to convert fossils to oil, and if the rock is too porous to keep the oil from escaping.

Seems easy enough but you have to remember that you’re competing with the world’s massive oil companies and their billions upon billions of dollars in resources who have spent the last 100 years scouring the earth to find potential oil reserves. The report that oil is at peak production now and will begin to run out around 2070 has been verified by Chevron, Exxon and other oil companies themselves. They’re not just guessing or making estimates, they know because they’ve been mapping and test drilling every continent on Earth for the next big find and they know that they’re running out of places to look. BP didn’t spend millions to drill a well in the Gulf of Mexico because they wanted a challenge; they did it because it’s one of the few untapped places left that has a possibility for finding oil.

Conclusion

Oil really is in decline. When the worlds oil conglomerates start freaking out that we’re running out of oil you know there is trouble. When you see oil companies like BP and Exxon begin diverting massive amounts of their revenue to renewable forms of energy production don’t fool yourself that they’re doing it to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy about saving the earth. They’re doing it to save themselves. It’s their job to know where oil is and if they can see it’s running out the only smart thing to do is to diversify into what energy production methods they think will take its place.

And even though the earth will always have a pocket of oil here or a reserve of waxy bitumen petroleum there, if it’s not economically feasible to extract and convert it it might as well be useless sludge. As demand rises, and resources fall the crossing point where oil is a feasible source of energy will be passed and all the currently “expensive” forms of renewable energy production will become the “cheap” forms of energy production.

The writing is on the wall and the people who will be best prepared for the changeover will be those who get in on the ground floor now.

…Actually all politician and politics in general.

Governor Schwarzenegger (no that’s not the problem, well hiring actors to be politicians is generally as bad idea, but nvm) has the brilliant idea of having everyday people twitter their ideas to fix the state.

Schwarzenegger has just launched a new Twitter-based site for California, MyIdea4CA.com.

That’s right, solve the states multiple issues in 140 characters or less with the same ease of calling somebody a “fascist Nazi” on a chat room or message board flame war.

If you want a quick idea how this will play out you can goto Yahoo.answers or 4Chan and ask people “How to I get this Girl to notice me?” Between the massive amount of messages saying you’re ugly and you should kill yourself there may be some actual suggestions that generally don’t help. And you learn your lesson that the first thing you should do to get a girl to notice you is to ignore all advice people give online.

So now we have the same thing coming from our government (yours actually, Caariifonia), except the ideas have to be in 140 characters or less.

Back in the day if you really wanted to make suggestions to your community and government leaders you went to a town hall meeting and waited your turn at a podium to speak directly to their faces.

But state and federal leaders were generally too busy to hear your ideas because they were on fundraising trips with wealthy donors for their re-election in 3 years. So you wrote a letter, mailed it in, and in 2 months received a canned response written by an intern on why they were going to ignore everything you said (they literally only read what the initial subject is, then send a response).

Recently email has allowed these multipage ideas of why their continued refusal to support telecommunication infrastructure improvements is allowing service providers to jack prices up in the name of “limited assets” to be sent instantaneously. And they don’t have to hire an intern to even read the first of the letter. Canned responses ignoring you can be constructed by a computer parsing the email for a few keywords.

Now we can just setup a live stream for people to shout into that will go directly into the trash without any other overhead. Maybe the Governator can point to the fact that the site has 300,000 followers, or that 1.5 million “suggestions” have been made and ignored. You know it’s just going to become a stream of pointless and ignored comments by people with no really interest in actually taking the effort to fix things.

This is all business as usual in the governments continued ignorance of how such rapidly changing technologies can be put to use benefiting the state and nation.

My favorite part however is the 140 character limit to the whole thing. Can you solve state and federal budget problems in 140 characters? How about dealing with failing healthcare, massive deficit issues, education reform, choking pollution, loss of natural resources, and lack of a comprehensive energy solution plan?

I’ve tried and every time I come up with the same answer for all:

“Stop Sucking and Do Something Useful like we hired you to; instead of wasting our time with pointless ideas you read in an article in Technology Monthly!”

Hang on-
154 Characters.
Fuck, it’s not even enough to tell them what a massive fail this is.

This is a great video that does a great job of opening up your mind so you can start to grasp just how amazing the universe is.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who “just don’t get it” when it comes to astronomy. When you stand alone looking up into the night sky and people ask you what you see, if you reply “the stars” they just shrug and walk away like there’s nothing amazing in that statement.

It’s the problem of taking something common for granted. Often people don’t even notice seeing the moon in the sky because it’s always there. You don’t get it until you stand there looking at it and you realize it’s real; not a CGI movie effect, not an image printed on paper or beamed onto a TV, it’s a huge actual physical object hanging above your head the same way bricks don’t. If you had a rope big enough you could throw a lasso around it and pull it down to you, just like George Bailey (and cause a cataclysmic impact that would destroy the Earth in the process).

It’s always awe-inspiring when you’re looking at the sky and your perspective begins to change from looking UP at a 2 dimensional speckled ceiling, to looking OUT into a vast field of objects more massive than anything in our solar system.
It helps to lay on your back with your head north and your feet south so that your sense of up and down matches with traditional models of the solar system orbiting the sun horizontally rather than vertically. Then you’re not looking up at the stars, you’re slapped to the side of a tiny spinning ball of rock, hurtling through space, surrounded by titanic spheres of exploding energy, clustered around an immense black hole that will eventually swallow everything you see.

If all that wasn’t enough this video shows us that the number of galaxies just like this outnumber all those stars you see in the sky.

Via Gizmodo.

Since I have

some investments I’m very happy that the Dow broke 9000 today. It’s an arbitrary number but it’s one I set as a goal in my mind back in February. I was thinking that if the Dow gets to 8000 by summer and 9000 by Christmas we’d be well on our way to recovery. Getting here this fast is a good sign that this won’t be the next Great Depression that so many people said it would be 8 months ago.

The gains in the last week have been almost too rapid that I think we’ll still see days below 8500 in the future. But like I said this is far better than I think anybody could have hoped for at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately the real world we live in feels the fallout longer than the market so even if we jump to 10,000 by Christmas (could you imagine!!) then it will still take a year or so for the real world to stabilize under the highs of Wall Street.

It’s funny that I hear people now saying that with the market at 9000 already that it’s proof that the stimulus bills were unneeded. Um… I think the reason it’s this high already is BECAUSE OF the stimulus bills; this is exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it better and faster than we thought they would.

Personally I think Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” was much better than Bush’s “T.A.R.P.” handout to the banks; but I think the rapid recovery of the last 6 months proves that not only have they worked, they worked better than the most optimistic of us expected.

Here’s hoping that in the next 6 months Wall Street will stabilize into a realistic 10,000 and companies can rebuild their foundations so we can avoid scares like this in the future (although I believe the market is driven on fear more than anything else but that’s a whole different discussion and I’m running already long).

And I promise this is the last of the financial posts.

Since I made an offhand blog post about this a while ago I wanted to post this. Panasonic has made a more powerful hand drier (for Japan) that dries you hands in 2 seconds.

Many people say that Japanese are superior at building new technology because of the Wii, PS3, Plasma HDTV’s etc. I think the real proof is that they have hand driers that work in less than 15 minutes, and the handrail on the escalators go the SAME SPEED as the escalator steps (those yellow textured tiles on sidewalks for blind people deserve an honorable mention too).

Via Engadget.

This show is probably the best entertainment put to screen. US, Japan, I don’t care where; nothing beats it.
However it’s a PITA to find copies of it. I guess people in Japan can stream the show on demand, good for them, but the rest of the world is missing out on all the greatness. By the way there are some interesting things you can do with computers nowdays.

Satoda Mai and the FUJIWARA duo are the only people I’m rooting for here; and seriously what’s up with the Animals? They always have interesting missions, but this is just weird.

Half the fun of this show is watching TARANTO run thorough places I visited when I was in Japan. Although I remember Ameyoko being shoulder to shoulder with people buying produce and meat. I always wonder how they get famous places like that so empty, the bit at the end of the show mentions the cooperation with the local police for safety and permission to shoot but I think they’re shooting in the early morning since Tokyo buisness doesn’t seem to “wake up” until about 9am. That also explains why most of the people in the background are delivery men, and a few early birds in suits aren’t showing up until the end of the show.

Modern American Suburban Housing
Originally uploaded by Kerensky97

We all know that China is the most populous country in the world and India is nipping at its heels. But not many people know that third place is our own United States of America. That’s right, the bronze medal in the "Holy Fuck that’s alot of people!" category is the USA.

As big as this nation is its not immediately apparent but when you think about it it makes perfect sense. A majority of Americans believe its their religious duty to populate the earth, and they’re succeeding quite well. Here in Utah 10-12 member families is common.

This is one of the many reasons why our housing is being crammed into smaller and smaller quarters. Much like Japan we’re bumping up against a resource ceiling that keeps us packed into cities. Although ours has less to do with physical space as it does with fresh water abundance/distribution and driving distances/time between locations. When I see the cramped expensive living conditions in Japan I wince; but we’re not really that far off.

Anyway, as kid I always looked forward to moving into a house surrounded by a yard so large it would seem like a home in a forest in the mountains. It seems that a large yard surrounding a small home is a thing of the past.

Update: Other reasons for homes separated by 3ft:
-Realtor Greed. Why sell one home in an acre when you can sell 8?
-Pride. My house is bigger than yours (even if there no room to walk in between them).
-Gluttony. How many of us have full rooms full of stuff we will never use before we die?
-Extravagance. I need 3 more garages for the Hummer, Escalade, and Jet-Skis

It makes me pine for the simple, isolated life Dick Proenneke (from "Alone in the Wilderness") lived with for the last 30 years of his life.