tingilinde

an unlevel playing field

Emission exemptions for luxury cars (mostly German).  Everyone should have the same standards - perhaps an exemption for very low volume manufacturers (say fewer than 1000 vehicles per year), but this seems like a pure give-away.  

Of course $10 a gallon gasoline would quickly fix the problem. 

bobby rules

He is an amazing combination of joy, passion and talent:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

the weight of nations

Current 2008 obesity figures (defined by BMI > 30.0 for residents over age 15) for several countries (source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

Of course body mass index is a faulty measure, but a serious percentage of a population over 30 is probably meaningful.  The US has been number one for about two decades.  

aaa roadside assistance - for bike riders

Only available in Oregon and parts of Idaho - this might be an important step for spreading bike riding.

excellent idea - hopefully it will spread throughout the country

charles darwin (the physicist) was right

Of course Charles Darwin was right, but his grandson was a physicist who proposed the movement of animals in the oceans made a non-trivial contribution to ocean mixing.  Really neat stuff!

Now work shows this may be about a terawatt -- about the same as mixing caused by the wind, or the tides. Listen to this week's podcast on Nature for details.

The paper appears in Nature (which, of course, has a paywall)

Nature 460, 624-626 (30 July 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08207; Received 15 December 2008; Accepted 9 June 2009

A viscosity-enhanced mechanism for biogenic ocean mixing
Kakani Katija¹ & John O. Dabiri^1,

of pageAbstract

Recent observations of biologically generated turbulence in the ocean have led to conflicting conclusions regarding the significance of the contribution of animal swimming to ocean mixing. Measurements indicate elevated turbulent dissipation—comparable with levels caused by winds and tides—in the vicinity of large populations of planktonic animals swimming together¹. However, it has also been noted that elevated turbulent dissipation is by itself insufficient proof of substantial biogenic mixing, because much of the turbulent kinetic energy of small animals is injected below the Ozmidov buoyancy length scale, where it is primarily dissipated as heat by the fluid viscosity before it can affect ocean mixing². Ongoing debate regarding biogenic mixing has focused on comparisons between animal wake turbulence and ocean turbulence^3, 4. Here, we show that a second, previously neglected mechanism of fluid mixing—first described over 50 years ago by Charles Darwin⁵— is the dominant mechanism of mixing by swimming animals. The efficiency of mixing by Darwin's mechanism is dependent on animal shape rather than fluid length scale and, unlike turbulent wake mixing, is enhanced by fluid viscosity. Therefore, it provides a means of biogenic mixing that can be equally effective in small zooplankton and large mammals. A theoretical model for the relative contributions of Darwinian mixing and turbulent wake mixing is created and validated by in situ field measurements of swimming jellyfish using a newly developed scuba-based laser velocimetry device⁶. Extrapolation of these results to other animals is straightforward given knowledge of the animal shape and orientation during vertical migration. On the basis of calculations of a broad range of aquatic animal species, we conclude that biogenic mixing via Darwin's mechanism can be a significant contributor to ocean mixing and nutrient transport.

1. Bioengineering,
    
1. Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
    

white to the rescue

White roofs have been proposed for years as a way to lower cooling costs (Greg, Saul, Art and others including me:)  It isn't a silver bullet, but it is a design choice that can make a lot of sense. 

Now, with some publicity from Steve Chu, the concept seems to be taking off...  

It always amazes me how most people focus on energy production, when the least expensive ways to save energy are often conservation and efficiency.

towards clothing that fits

Once clothing was custom tailored for those who could afford it, but mass production brought the concept of sizing -  an approximate notion that sort of works.  For most guys it isn't a big deal, but women generally expect a better fit and a someone who is a size 8 in one dimension may not be in another.  One study indicated more than half of women of a given "size" have some issues with fit. 

With a few exceptions "custom" clothing means printing user designs on tshirts or allowing customer input of a five to ten measurements.  Of course if  you have money you can go to a good tailor or dress maker. If you have a lot of money a designer can get involved. 

About ten years ago body scanners began to appear. The idea was to acquire enough information accurately enough to drive custom fabrication tools.  Some universities like Cornell were involved in the work (see an interesting history by the Cornell folks here) and an interesting future was sketched out.  You still need good three dimensional models of the human body and skilled designers, but now the model could be manipulated to match an accurate representation of your body and an electronic pattern could drive automatic cutting machines.    A really nice idea, but too expensive given the extremely low cost of mass production in the third world.  As a result there are only a handful of small companies that use scanners.

One is indiDenim.  If you visit their Emeyville, CA location they will scan you with an Intellifit scanner and a few weeks later jeans are shipped to you from a fabrication plant in Mexico.  They also will work with your measurements you supply, but folklore is the probability of getting a good fit is much better if you are scanned.

Intellifit was recently acquired by Unique Solutions and it will be interesting to see if they can make a go of the business.  Their scanner is rf based rather than a laser scanner, so you don't need to dress in something that makes you nearly naked.  They advertise scans for about $50 and will have fabrication partners.  So far the partner list is slim and there are only two scanners in the US (four more "coming soon").   I hope they will succeed, but for now it may be most practical for people who have extremely difficult fit problems - the people who have to use tailors anyway. 

The apparel business is a large chunk of the economy and a large fraction of customers are not happy with fit ...  there is a real opportunity for someone to get it right.  Standards are needed as well as inexpensive scanners (scanners could get very inexpensive if you made them in the tens of thousands).  One could imagine Google or Amazon being a broker who might jumpstart this in order to collect your data and be a connection hub to designers and fabricators.  Custom will probably mean precise fit with a bit of user selected customization available, but the choices will probably be based on an existing design.  Most people can't design - so think of it as a list of options. 

The apparel industry has too many layers and inefficiencies - it basically works because you can find $2/day labor in the third world.  One wonders how long that can last given the possibility for a system that can produce clothing that fits.  And if this happens there may be people who are doing street fashion now who might find the barrier to design much lower.  Something about ten thousand flowers blooming...

And there are shoes - at least one company is scanning feet and making custom shoes (it seems spendy, but I have no idea what custom shoes cost)

(thanks to Jheri for great discussions on this)

sweet vortex cannon

We built a few simple vortex generators when I was at Bell Labs during the fun and creative period. 

This one is seriously better than anything I've seen. As Greg says:  "I need one"

tracking packages on the iphone

hmmm  - none of the free iPhone package tracking apps looked good, but this web page is sized for the device and works well

paranoia in american politics

Jim pointed out an essay by Richard Hofstadter that rings true today 

an excerpt

    The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

    This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

    We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.