Monthly Archives: December 2004

Astronaut: ‘Single-Planet Species Don’t Last’

I call bullsh*.

Shuttle astronaut John Young made the following claim:

The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You’re 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.’

You would think that a shuttle astronaut would know better. Let’s examine this claim in some detail, shall we? First of all, let’s assume that the particular causes mentioned (asteroid collision, super volcanoes etc) have nothing to do with human activity. It’s hard to imagine how they could be. Now, the chances of humanity surviving 100 years is 444/455 454/455. You can multiply these probabilities out, and you find that humanity had only an 8 percent chance of surviving 10000 years, and the chances of surviving one hundred thousand years is about one in 2.35E11. This works out to a 97% chance of surviving ten thousand years, an 11% chance of surviving one hundred thousand years, and only a one in thirty five million chance of surviving one million years.

Stuck inside for the holidays?

Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics | Publications | 2004 | Abstract of preprint 2004.3
This paper explains how one can crochet the Lorenz manifold, the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system.

My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was only five or six. I wonder how long it would take me to bat one of these out. I further wonder what could posess me to try…

Brainwagon Radio: Dead KVM Switch, Rants, Dickens and Mediocre Audio

In trying to fix his previous noise problems, your host appears to have squelched that a bit, but ends up with clippy audio. Sigh.

More stuff:

Digital Libraries Considered Bad

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the stupidity of people. Today’s installment comes from the editorial pages of the New York Times, where we find the following (registration required):

To the Editor:

Re “Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database” (front page, Dec. 14):

While having online access to some great libraries promises to facilitate research in democratizing access to books, it is worth keeping some things in mind.

A digital version of a book – especially a rare one, printed centuries ago – is not a replacement for the hard copy.

Not only has printed paper proved a durable technology, but there is also much to be gained by visiting the libraries, examining the actual books and entering into discussions with librarians and other researchers.

Gaining access to a digital reproduction of an older text makes it easier to take a first step, but little good research will be done simply sitting alone in front of a computer screen.

Lisa Shapiro
Vancouver, British Columbia
Dec. 14, 2004
The writer is an assistant professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University.

It’s hard to imagine a more stupid response to the news that Google will open up access to potentially millions of books via the Internet. Honestly Professor Shapiro, just what are you thinking?

It is clear (and obvious) that digital copies are not the same as having the real book. But consider this: I have never seen a real Gutenberg Bible. But I know what one looks like. I haven’t seen copies of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelescium, or Galileo’s Siderius Noncius, but I can buy them. Are you saying that my ability to do research is somehow inhibited by the relatively easy ability of inexpensive digital copies of these works?

And for pity sakes, when you say that you are deprived of conversations with librarians and researchers, just what do you think the Internet is for? That screen in front of you? It allows you to communicate with millions and soon to be billions of other people.

And those librarians and researchers? They publish books too. Books that will be made available through digitization efforts like the one Google proposed. I don’t need to be in the same room to them to be influenced by their ideas.

Consider going over to Project Gutenberg’s CD Project website. You can download 600 eBooks onto a CD. You can download 9400 books onto a DVD. If Professor Shapiro thinks that nothing will come of making these works available at literally no cost to anyone within range of the Internet, I can’t help but shake my head at the ivory tower that these academics live in.

TinyP2P

Ed Felton of freedom-to-tinker has released a tiny 15 line Python program called TinyP2P which allows you to create a simple (if not secure or scaleable) file sharing network. Get the code here. It’s cute, and might not be bad for tiny bits of file sharing.

Addendum: Actually trying to run it, I got 

localhost - - [15/Dec/2004 15:53:33] "POST /RPC2 HTTP/1.0" 200 -
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../tinyp2p.py", line 14, in ?
    for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]):
  File "/u0/markv/my-python/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1029, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File "/u0/markv/my-python/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1316, in __request    verbose=self.__verbose
  File "/u0/markv/my-python/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1080, in request
    return self._parse_response(h.getfile(), sock)
  File "/u0/markv/my-python/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1219, in _parse_response
    return u.close()
  File "/u0/markv/my-python/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 742, in close
    raise Fault(**self._stack[0])
xmlrpclib.Fault:

The Future of Scanners?

Gizmodo had a link to a flexible book scanner, basically a sheet of plastic filled with organic photodiodes and phototransistors that act as a scanner. Chasing down links for a meatier description, I found Semiconductor International – Organic Devices on Flexible Substrates Advance – 11/1/2004 – Semiconductor International – CA476270

In other work to be presented at IEDM, researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a large-area, flexible and lightweight sheet image scanner integrated with organic field-effect transistors and organic photodiodes (Figure ). The scanner is made of cells that consist of an organic transistor and organic photodetector, with an effective sensing area of 50 x 50 um2. The entire imager has an effective sensing area of 2 in. and resolution of 36 dots per inch (dpi), with the potential to go up to 250 dpi. The photodetectors distinguish between black and white by sensing the difference in reflected light from black and white parts of an image. The thin-film pentacene transistors have 180 um channel lengths and electron mobilities of 0.7 cm2/Vsec.

The current 36dpi resolution isn’t very interesting, but 250dpi sounds pretty good. I wonder if it will be here before electronic paper…