Category Archives: Technology

Memory wipe

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I’ve written programs to securely wipe your hard disk upon your command. I wrote a prototype ‘virus’ that wiped your newly installed hard disk on the first boot even if you had removed all previous disks, CDs, DVDs, and thumb drives. I have reduced permanent storage devices to their molecular components.

But to the best of my knowledge (if I wiped my own brain would I know?) I have never wiped a human brain clean of memories before:

While sex can be forgettable or mind-blowing, for some people, it can quite literally be both at the same time. The woman, whose case was reported in the September issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine, was experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare condition in which memory suddenly, temporarily, disappears.

I guess I’ll have to just keep trying.

On the seventh day

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If you follow my Tweets you will know that I submitted a Windows Phone 7 application on February 25th. In my Tweet I asked, “Does anyone know how long it takes for it be certified and published?”

No one responded.

Yesterday I asked a guy at work who had gone through the process. “About 60 days” was his response. But then he explained it was a very special case that involved getting special permission, blah, blah, blah…

I dug deeper into Microsoft App Hub and found:

Certification takes an average of five business days. If it has been longer than seven days to complete Certification, contact Support from the e-Form from your account Dashboard.

Today, just a few hours from it being a full seven days, I received an email telling me the app had been published.

Still it doesn’t show up in the market place. After some more searching I found (on the same page as the previous quote):

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for the app to show up in the catalog.

So my work is finished and now I must wait a day.

And so on the seventh day it was finished and it was very good. And on the seventh day I rested.

So here is a direct link to “As the Crow Flies”. It isn’t currently active but will be within 24 hours.

This is a very simple app that measures the great circle distance between any two points on the surface of the earth using Bing Maps with aerial photography. The points could be your office and that beach in the Bahamas. It could be the opposite sides of the Space Needle. It could be the distance from your shooting position to that cardboard box filled with explosives on the hillside.

Update 3/5/2012 4:24 AM: The link to the app above now works but searching in the marketplace still does not.

Update 3/5/2012 6:45 AM: The app is fully active in the marketplace now.

How to make Potassium Chlorate

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Potassium Chlorate is one of the ingredients in Boomerite. I’ve often fantasized about making it myself because it’s the most expensive component, it requires an ATF explosives license to purchase in the quantities I need, and my sole supplier is in New Jersey.

Here is how to make it in your garage/kitchen/basement:

I think I will continue to purchase it. We use about 350 pounds per year and scaling up the process above to meet our needs just doesn’t look worthwhile.

Skynet is near

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I’ve been listening to the book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. If you never have had any concerns about Skynet becoming reality this book will shake you up. If you thought Skynet was science fiction but plausible this book will put you on full alert.

Wow!

Author Ray Kurzweil makes a strong case that technology (and as an aside, biological evolution) advances at an exponential rate. I forget the exact numbers but he claims that we can now expect to see the equivalent of all the advances we saw in the entire 20th century to happen in the something like first 20 years of the 21st Century. Then those advances again in something like 10 years. He also claims a case can be made that the exponent in the exponential growth equation is itself increasing exponentially!

The reason the technological growth can increase so rapidly is that we have created tools to create technology more easily. And we create tools to create tools. We have computers that can be taught to see and track objects. We have computers sitting under our desks that have the “brain power” for some task that exceed the capacity of several planets of sentient beings. Soon we will have computers that can not only be used technological levers guided by humans but can create their own tools.

The maximum communication speed of biochemical signals of animals is about 100 meters per second. And the distances those signals need to travel during thinking are on the order of centimeters. These factors are hard physical limits on how fast we can think. A computer has similar problems but the physical limits are not nearly as constraining. Communication speed is approximately 300,000,000 meters per second and the distances are on the order of millimeters. This gives a computer an speed advantage of approximately 30,000,000.

In communication and teaching others humans are limited by our language and our ability to learn a new skill. How many words per minute can a person read or hear and understand and apply? If you are skilled in the field you may be able to read and understand what another subject matter expert tells you but it will still take practice before you can perform at the same level as your teacher. With a computer it can “teach” another computer at whatever rate it takes to transfer the software. The cellphone in your pocket “learns” a new skill with perfect repeatability from other computers in the few seconds it takes to download the app through the sky via the nearest cell tower from the ‘net.

Today that ‘net is the Internet.

Update: Sarah recommended the book to me. She has more to offer on the topic.

Random thought of the day

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Time travel is obviously possible. Everyone does it all the time. Just sitting around doing nothing we travel through time at a rate of 1 second per 1000 milliseconds. What’s more interesting is how we can travel through time at a different rate and how this prohibits any time paradoxes from occurring such traveling into the future to meet an older version of yourself.

As I have posted before we are always traveling at a constant speed. This is the speed of light and we cannot change that. What we can change is the direction in which we travel. Nearly all of our velocity is on the time axis but as soon as we move in the conventional sense our velocity in time slows down such that the magnitude of our velocity vector remains constant.

What this means is that every time you travel away from someone and come back you are out of synch with them in regards to time. In nearly all cases the difference is in femtoseconds and is totally irrelevant. What is be more interesting and is conceptually possible is to spend a year (in your perception) and travel two (or ten) years in time as perceived by the people you left behind.

If such a machine were built it would more properly be called a “time vehicle” than a “time machine”. To travel any interesting distance in time would require enormous amounts of energy and you cannot retrace your path or go backward in time.

Using such a machine it would be impossible to meet yourself in the future. Use of the vehicle would be exactly analogous to taking a shortcut to some geographical location your friends were traveling to. You will have traveled a shorter distance than your friends but arrive at the same location. It is not possible for you to travel both paths simultaneously.

I woke up at about 4:00 AM this morning and it took an hour or so of thinking about this before I could go back to sleep.

I want one

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I have the software for this. I just don’t have a way of integrating it with the proper hardware. It sounds really nice:

The next generation of battlefield optics will empower infantrymen to hit enemy targets from twice the effective range of the M4 carbine if Defense Department scientists get their way.

This summer, officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are scheduled to begin testing prototypes of the Dynamic Image Gunsight Optic, known as “DInGO.”

…

Currently, the device weighs about a pound and is approximately five inches long, three inches wide and three inches high, Wojnar said. It has a digital micro display that originated in the cell phone industry.

I know there are similar devices on the market now but the ones I have seen are larger and more appropriate for the .50 BMG or at least a .30 caliber rifle. Something small and compact for an AR-15 class rifle would be nice.

H/T to reader Richard R.

Terminator building blocks

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Implementation of SkyNet and the Terminator are a little behind the original schedule but progress is still being made:

“The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: ‘Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does. They put another layer of cells behind that it started to find features, They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something, another layer, it started to find patterns,” Jacobs said.

“Today it tracks objects. It’s actually not programmed, it’s taught.”

Jacobs laughed at the silence in the room, conceding he evokes images of “The Terminator.”

SkyNet building blocks are falling into place as well:

The long term future belongs to optical interconnects, low power processors and new kinds of memory architectures, said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs in a DesignCon keynote here.

Banerjee described the path to a terabyte/second optical bus as one step toward its vision of future systems architectures. Engineers need to embrace the new technologies to deal with the coming flood of digital data, he said.

“By 2020 your end customer will be living in a world where people access 50 zettabytes of data from 30 billion cellphones and 1.3 trillion sensors–and all that data will have to be analyzed by computer architectures you have to design,” he told a packed audience here.

Unreasonable searches

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I could see the day when the government attempts to get a search warrant for your thoughts:

A group of neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reported they may have come up with a scientific way to read people’s minds.

They can already demand blood samples so why not connect you up to a machine to see if you have anti-government thoughts or knowledge of a crime?

Laser Guided Bullets

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We had radar proximity fuses in use in AAA rounds during W.W. II, and they of course used vacuum tube technology.  One of the members of our local ham radio club worked on that project in the ’40s.  One of the challenges for his team was developing tubes that could withstand the 10s of thousands of Gs at launch.  Ouch.

Now we have this, via an e-mail from my nephew.  I find it fascinating, funny, and a little disturbing all at the same time.  Ordinary rifles spin a bullet at 2K RPM?  They missed that one by an order of magnitude or two.  A rifle chambered for the 5.56 NATO round for example rotates the bullet at around 300,000 RPM, more or less depending on barrel length, rifling twist and bullet weight.  But as I often say; what’s an order of magnitude (or two) between friends?

It is very telling, if not entirely predictable, how they smear the general public in the article– government = good, whereas regular citizens = dangerous or at least troubling.  They of course have it entirely upside down and backwards in that department.

A hint

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Drones may be a significant threat:

It allows truly scalable global coercion:  the automation of comply or die. 
 
Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn’t that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).
 
Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

…

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them.  When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Drones also need to be built, communicate with people on the ground, refueled and rearmed. And if they are using your cell phone for tracking and terminal guidance that phone doesn’t need to remain in your possession. It might just be that a vehicle supplying the drone base could use an old cell phone for a few days.

The Ultimate Reloader

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Spending more time on the loading press.  Thinking hard about a progressive, as this one step business grates.  The loading rates they talk about are of course totally wrong, as they don’t include the hours upon hours spent prepping cases before you can start “reloading” on your 600 rounds per hour progressive machine.  I once timed a guy with his new state-of-the-art case prep center on Youtube, and came up with eight hours per thousand, IIRC.

I once sat down and figured how much technology would be needed to take your spent brass from the range and go straight to the progressive with it.  There was a motorized cleaning station, an RF induction annealing die, followed by a water-cooled sizing die (the brass would come in hot, you see, and since you’ll have to run water through your annealing die there’ll already be a cooling system) plus trimming and chamfering stations.  Depending on the case and bullet type, there may be an “M” die station.  I think I once came up with twelve or thirteen stations in all, to really have it all, no matter what.  I don’t know– $20,000.00?  Thoughbeit a small one, I figure there’d be a market for it.

I was looking at the Hornady L&L, but I’m being told the Dillon 650 is a better bet.  It’s listed for something like 600 bucks, but looking at the required hardware for actually loading a few calibers it’s over a thousand for sure, and from there you spend a little more.  I’ll have to resign myself to prepping cases the old-fashioned way– one at a time.

You have to like it, considering it a hobby, because if you figure the value of your time I don’t see the numbers working out.  You do get a little bit of independence from it, though you still need a supply of consumables.  If you want near total independence you should have a flintlock, make your own black powder using nitrate from the stockyard (I’ve heard of it being done without sulphur. It’s less powerfull but it works. If you live near an active volcano you may be covered there) and cast your own lead from scrap.  Ah, but you still need a supply of flint.  Man, this deteriorated quickly.  Sharp sticks.  There you have it.

Random thought of the day

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With partial credit given to Jeff Foxworthy…

If you can count to 1023 on your fingers then you might be a computer jockey.

What the World Needs

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There was an article in a recent issue of Guns and Ammo Magazine about what gun products the various gun writers would like to see.  Most of the suggestions were for re-issues of favorite old gun models.

Here’s what we really need though– A variable power Intermediate Eye Relief (IER or “Scout”) scope with an illuminated reticle.  I see that Leupold now has a variable Scout scope in their VXII series, but without illumination.  Some of the big optics retailers show it for sale, but I can’t find it on Leupold’s web site.  If I had to choose, I’d take the illuminated reticle over the variable power though.  A fixed 3x or even 4x would be just dandy.

Trijicon has it figured out.  The illuminated reticles in their ACOG series are just the ticket for fast target acquisition.  You use them like a reflex sight with both eyes at close range, for speed, and their fixed 4x models are good out to farther than most people will shoot. (See Bindon Aiming Concept, or BAC)  Trijicon doesn’t make an IER version of the ACOG, else that would be the end of the discussion.  Something like that mounted low on an M1A with the M8 rail would rock, I tell you.  That scope would also be just the ticket for the dangerous game hunting market, for them that likes optics.

With more options available for forward mounted optics, and with Ruger jumping in with their new Scout rifle, there is no doubt a market for such an animal.  I see that in the sub 100 dollar range (complete with rings) the Chinese companies have an illuminated Scout scope, but the world needs a really good one, made in a really good country, like this one.  A couple guys from NightForce Optics came over and we spoke about it, but they didn’t seem to be terribly excited.  Maybe I didn’t do enough convincing.

Let’s see it, World.  I (and my customers) want a ~1x to ~4x IER scope with a ~32 to ~40 mm objective, with something like Trijicon’s illuminated chevron and some vertical range ticks.  Ready…..Go!

Percentages

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This is one of my pet peeves too:

Percentage Points

People often think that if you decrease something by 50% then increase it by 50% you end up with the original value. It’s surprisingly difficult for people to grasp this is not true. I found it works better if you use 100% reduction followed by a 100% increase. When they say, “But that is different.” I just walk away to avoid the nearly irresistible urge to do some minor cleaning of the gene pool.

Help the Cooking Shows

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Anyone else notice that on “Chopped”, or “Top Chef”, etc., it happens nearly every episode that someone fails or nearly fails a challenge because they can’t get their pan(s) hot enough?  They’re using top dollar gas ranges.  What’s up with that?  And I wonder why no one seems to notice after all these failures.  Do they have some federally mandated energy-saving analog to the NASCAR restricter plates on the gas controls?  Maybe it’s just a bad idea to use a stainless steel pan having a mirror finish on the bottom, what?  Maybe someone should do them a favor– go to Goodwill and get a used electric range from the 1970s for fifty bucks, and an old cast iron frying pan with matching saucepan, and donate them to one of the shows.  Seventy five bucks per cooking station, tops, and they’d never have this problem again.  That stuff works for me, anyway.

Quote of the day—Tam

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Of course it will sell like gangbusters. This is, after all, a round marketed to people whose knowledge of terminal ballistics is so shaky that they’ve already bought a Taurus Judge for personal protection.

Tam
November 19, 2011
While, yes, it is technically a shotgun…
[I lifted my moratorium (no one else would have a chance if I didn’t put her in a special class) on Tam being my QOTD for this one.

When I first started getting into guns I would spend a lot of time reading magazine articles on terminal ballistics, the latest modern/high-performance/next-generation/whatever ammo. I fired various bullet styles in various weights into milk jugs filled with water. I bought and read various books. The various authors called each other names and said they were sloppy researchers, ignorant, and then got nasty with each other.

My conclusion from all of this was that the bullet MUST penetrate. Expansion is good but not required. The time spent reading and researching was better spent learning and practicing to put another bullet beside the first one in the minimum time possible.

Tam, in her post, nails it. This round only needs to be given a couple of seconds of consideration before totally rejecting it in favor of almost any other round unless you are defending yourself from anemic rabbits three feet away nibbling on your strawberries.—Joe]

This is Sort of Cool

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I guess.  It’s an electric milti-copter.  It has one thing going for it that a number of flying machines don’t have– it’s actually gotten off the ground with a human aboard.  I don’t know what it has to offer that a regular helicopter or auto-gyro doesn’t.  Maybe it’s the power transmission system being electrical wires instead of drive shafts and belts.  I immediately though of a hybrid (gas/electric) system, and they talk about that on their web site.  Great as batteries have become, they’re still no match for gasoline.

Still, the main obstacle to wide-spread (affordable) personal aircraft is the FAA and similar, tax-payer-funded authoritarian gangs.  Note that one of the benefits to the multi-copter sited is the fact that it can be flown as an ultra-light– it gets past a lot of the aviation regs.  In a free market we’d all have viable, affordable options for our own aircraft right now.  Poor college kids would have them, as easily as they now have old beat-up cars.

I suppose that would scare the pee out of the authoritarian cowards, so maybe it could be said that we have our current, restrictive system as a means of avoiding the embarrassment for certain people who would soil themselves in public, falling into the fetal position and sucking their thumbs, or simply getting angry and losing control that way.  Frankly, I’d kind of like to see that.  Not in that it would be pleasant, mind you, but it would indicate that we’re on the right track.  In a society where cowards are given any notice other than to receive our contempt, or where cowards actually run things, there will be much impediment to real progress.

HT to the Blaze

Web traffic

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If Alexa can be believed The Brady Campaign web site has a traffic rank of about 1.1 million. This compares to Say Uncle with a traffic rank of about 283,000.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence comes in almost dead even with the Violence Policy Center web site with ranks of almost 2.9 million.

Even my obscure blog nearly has the traffic of the Brady Campaign with a traffic rank of 1.24 million.

When I, blogging a few hours a week while working a full time job, can generate almost as much traffic as a the Brady Campaign with a full time staff and millions of dollars of income you have to know the general public just isn’t interested in their messages.

Give it up guys. You lost, we won. It’s time to change your names and rejoin civilized society.

Hanging them with their own rope

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A biometric login for your computer is useful and very cool. A biometric database of 9 million Jews with pictures, fingerprints, name, date of birth, national identification number, and family members is a target.

From 1933 through the early 1940’s IBM made a lot of money helping the Germans collect, sort, and distribute that sort of data.

That target was hit and is now available for free download.

Think about the implications before you advocate for a National ID card or the mandating of ID in order to be functioning member of society. Giving up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety has known consequences.

Update: Tamara knocks it out of the park.

Homemade Rocket to the Edge of Space

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This was pretty inspiring.  I didn’t catch whether it had any guidance or whether it was just a dumb rocket.  Note the epoxy camera cover melting as it approaches Mach Three.  Things get pretty quiet after MECO at that altitude.  Retrieving it a few miles from the launch site was pretty amazing.  It must have had a pretty quick descent after climbing nearly 20 miles.

My junior high school rocket club never did anything nearly so cool, but I did once built a small, very sleek wood, plastic and paper rocket, powered by two “D” engines grafted together by turning them on the lathe to produce a tight socket & tenon joint, like a clarinet body– two “D” fuel charges stacked under a delay and ‘chute charge in the same case.  It went out of sight and stayed there for quite a while- well over 1,000 feet– 1% of what those guys did.  With the longest delay I could get in a locally available engine, it was still going so fast upon ‘chute deployment that it ripped most of the shroud lines.  That was before I found out you could get “E” engines.