ADAMANT

The Information

The digital age does not count on its fingers

Computers clump zeros and ones into packets of eight called ' Bytes', but  to speak of Kilobytes is an insult to the Binary System. When Ubergeeks talk kilobytes , they are not referring to thousands of the things , but two to the tenth power of them--  32 times 32 is 1024 , not 1000

In 2002 , Roy Williams pointed out that any Richter Scale defining the quantitative impact of Information will err by millions if gigabytes are rounded off to eight billion bits- Yet as this list illustrates, a million isn't what it used to be: 

• A bit is the information in one coin toss - yes or no, 1 or zero, win or lose.
• A byte is 8 bits ; 5 bits approximate the information in the letter A.
• A kilobyte is about one handwritten page.
  • 50  kilobytes: The Constitution of the United States
  • 75 kilobytes:  Executive Summary of new UN global warming report
  • 250 kilobytes: an editorial cartoon
• A megabyte is  2²⁰ bytes
  • 1 megabyte: a rather short novel .
  • 2 megabytes: a sharp color photograph.
  • 5 megabytes: Shakespeare's Works
  • 25 megabytes The actual UN global warming report
  • 100 megabytes: A yard of books.
  • 500 megabytes: a CD
• A gigabyte is  2³⁰ bytes
  •   1 gigabyte : the human genome , or a ton of books.
  • 10 gigabytes: a  BlueRay DVD of The Matrix Trilogy
  • 20 gigabytes: The Complete Mozart in very high fidelity
    
  • 250 gigabytes: the ground floor of Harvard's Widener Library
    
• a terabyte is  2⁴⁰ bytes.
  • ~ 1 terabyte: the sum of all Federal , State and City regulations
  • 2.5 terabytes: Everything in Widener Library.
  • 5 terabytes: every article in every academic journal printed last year.
  • 10 terabytes: The Library of Congress.
  • 40 terabytes: every word in all the hardcover books printed last year
    
  • 50 terabytes: all of last year's mass market periodicals.
  • 60 terabytes: all the audio CDs sold last year.
  • 150 terabytes: all  the newspapers printed in 2006.
• A petabyte is ~ 10¹⁵ bytes--2⁵⁰ to be exact.
  • 1 petabyte:   last year's global production of office documents.
  • 3 petabytes: all the libraries in America.
  • 10 petabytes: all the film Hollywood ran through its cameras in 2006
  • 400 petabytes: every snapshot taken in 2006
• An exabyte is  2⁶⁰ bytes . 
  • 2 exabytes: the capacity of all hard disks produced last year
    
  • 5 exabytes: every word so far spoken.
    
  • 6 exabytes: the DNA of everyone living
  • 10 exabytes: everything on videotape
• A zettabyte is the estimated total cell phone pixel capture by the year 2018
• A yottabyte is how many atoms can dance on the head of a terapin.

A Long Row To Hoe

Proposals for an alcohol-fueled end to dependence on foreign oil do not sit lightly on the American landscape.

Can they fit within our borders at all?

State Of The Union speeches tend to cross using figures with speaking figuratively, and this hybrid rhetoric can bear strange fruit, like the switchgrass mania spreading up K Street like kudzu. Math has never been the Beltway's strongest suit, and it will take a while for many in DC to realize that biofuel, like the solar and wind energy franchises already on offer, suffers from sheer lack of real estate. A recent WSJ Op-ed devoted a thousand words to singing the praises of cellulose fermentation , but neglected to divide its rosy bottom line  projections by ethanol's depressingly low energy content - a barrel of the stuff falls so far short of  real gasoline-- over two million BTU's,that you'd need about ten gallons  extra to equal a tankful. Japan's last gasp in World War II was distilling biomass to get kamekaze fuel.

Solar ranching translates into paving areas the size of Massachusetts with silicon panels. But farming out the fuel supply means putting multiples of Texas under the plough. Even corn as tall as an elephant's eye yields less than half a gallon of ethanol per acre per day. And biotech might, at best, wring another quart out of fertile farmland.

That's just not enough...

The Deep Space Diet

Space tourism may not be to everyone's taste, but it opens the hope that, Out There, even supermodels can eat all they want.

Nature reports the imaging of a pair of twin neutron stars , each sixteen miles in diameter, with gravity 100,000 times stronger than on the face of the  Earth. This may open alarming new perspectives in Chiropractic and Virtual Dieting .

Approaching within 8 miles , the first intrepid  runway astronauts to visit these brave new worlds will experience Spanish Inquisition spinal forces, but at the same time their waistlines should contract to 18 inches or less. This pleasant realization will give way to heavy (~ 5 metric tonne) hearts 4 miles out , and on spiraling in to one mile they will alas discover that a rising tide rips all ships.

 

 

OWEN HARRIES

The man who launched The End Of History is alive , well, and manifestly still worth listening to, as in this interview with Francis Fukuyama

His Dogma Ate His Karma

Maulavi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, former Taliban governor of Afghanistan's Bamiyan province, was blown away  by an unnamed assailant  while en route to Friday prayers in Kabul, said Zulmai Khan, Kabul's deputy police chief. Mohammadi was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province when the world's largest monolithic Buddha , dating to the 5th century, was blown up by dynamite and artillery fire in March 2001.

On being elected to represent  Samangan province  in Afghanistan's parliament in 2005 , Mohammadi  said "It was foreigners like Chechens and Arabs with the Taliban who made the decision. They were crazy people,"

Technorati Profile

The Bleeding Edge

 

THE BLEEDING EDGE, AND GUMS ,

    OF NUCLEAR  INTELLIGENCE

By Russell Seitz      

   

 

A generation before neocon happy warriors and hegemony buffs started hooting up faulty WMD ntelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq, George Kennan observed that if mistakes were grounds for dismissal, not an intel analyst would remain in the corridors of power.  WMD’s and nuclear ambitions have never been easy to fathom. America began sharpening the  tools to harvest technical intelligence before the birth of the atomic bomb, but some early gathers of nuclear secrets ended up cutting themselves in the process.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II,  General George Marshall ordered espionage covering all enemy "scientific military developments. “ In 1941,the OSS followed up with

The Common Review

Is an uncommonly good one, and as a book reviewer I see quite a few. Read its take on

' The Knowledge Deficit, by E. D. Hirsch Jr. , and you may return for more.

The Continuing Tinfoil Crisis

America's self help mania has blossomed into support groups for those who think the voices in their heads are the work of the Pentagon, intergalactic neer'-do-wells or the Bavarian Illuminati.

Writing in The Washington Post , Sharon Weinberger recently noted that : "Tinfoil Hats , a cultural joke to many," are a sartorial reality to the few , the proud , the profoundly gonzo. Her inquiry into " the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams." conceals a  profound change in popular culture. One of the nation's oldest and best beloved materials has gone missing--

Tin foil is on the verge of extinction.

" In 2005" says Weinberger ,"a group of MIT students conducted a formal study using aluminum foil and radio signals. Their surprising finding: Tinfoil hats may actually amplify radio frequency signals...while a few Thought Controlees  realized it was a joke at their expense, some saw the findings as an explanation for why tinfoil didn't seem to stop the voices. Others vouched for the material.

"Tinfoil helps tremendously," reports one conference call participant, who describes wrapping it around her body underneath her clothing."Where do you put the tinfoil?" a man asks. "Anywhere, everywhere," she replies. "I even put it in a hat."  The sources of delusion are hard to diagnose, but these  seem to have a common denominator- headgear made of the Wrong Stuff.  As a matter of material fact, no one Weinberg interviewed has tried bona fide tin foil. The stuff has become rarer than hens teeth that rectify the thought waves of  L. Ron Hubbard.

Tin has been synonymous with civilization since it was first alloyed with copper to create the cutting edge of Bronze Age technology. The Greeks and Phoenicians persued it to the ends of the Earth ,and once tin evolved into foil, it backed the mirrors of Versailles and became the medium of Edison's first recording of the human voice. Yet though MIT's metallurgical supply room is lavishly stocked , its shelves have been bare of tin foil for a decade-- its students simply couldn't muster the Right Stuff for their critical experiment.

Until  high powered rolling mills drove it to commercial extinction , soft tin did the office of stiff aluminum foil . As a small child I saw an unforgettable example of the dying art of stannery unveiled and cut asunder-- an embossed heraldic sheet sealing a veritable tin of Danish Christmas cookies. The last I encountered unwrapped soundlessly from  around a sandwich served on a remote Pacific island in 1975. 

The colonial time warp that allowed tin foil's space age survival in the New Hebrides has evaporated , but the ancient grey metal will doubtless flow as long as the solder industry soldiers on. Yet to  minds that imagine themselves left hatless by the machinations of the Tin Cartel , a burning question endures. To what evil purpose are the Gnomes of Zurich and Zinnwald  conspiring to put their glittering hoard?

Real Climate's patriotic Gore

Like  the generally dormant volcano that it is , the scientifically astute Real Climate website has erupted into high political dudgeon at the reluctance of the National Science  Teacher's  Accociation to make  a disaster movie of Biblical proportions starring a former Senator , "part of the standard curriculum' as have some European nations.

The fur is also flying  from a climate catfight on the other side of the aisle- ABC  Weatherman Jim Spann is leading an assault on calls for upping the certification requirements for TV forcasters to include, gasp, atmospheric science.

The whole bizzare thing is being vigorously Fisked over at Prometheus

Back at Real Climate, the ever moderate Ray Pierre, the RealClimateer in change of what's fit to print in the NSTA debate  , has been talking out of class - he is quoted thus over at Rabett Run :

' Ray pierre said: "Indeed, when I posted the article and started moderating the comments, what I hoped to hear about were details of NSTA's resources for teaching global warming, and their plans for expanding and improving them. Instead what I mostly got were a bunch of Gore haters coming out of the woodwork to throw mud at the movie and at Laurie David. (as well as, gratifyingly, a good number of RC regulars defending the basic correctness of the science in the movie). At the start I was willing to give NSTA the benefit of the doubt, but as more and more of the full story came out, it began to look like NSTA really did have something to hide. As I said, I still hope to be proven wrong."

Full disclosure-  for the first time I can recall, Real Climate failed to run my comment on the flack - only 198 posts passed muster with Ray Pierre, and mine evidently was too critical of Al's numeracy  and the departure of the film's truthiness from norms of scientific per review to make the cut. I still hope to be proven wrong about  Real Climate's  having second thoughts about the value of scientific candor .

 

O, for a Muse of fire!

Hailing the 62nd Anniversary Armed Forces Day on 27 March, Myanmar's Subcommittee for Holding of the Military and Marching Song Competition of the Work Committee for the Organizing of Poem and Arts Competition , Deputy Minister for Culture U Soe Nyuntas chairman, announced there will be only one category, Professional Level, for the military marching song competition.

"Songs must be composed and based on the twelve objectives of the State, the objectives of the 62nd  Anniversary Armed Forces Day and the twelve fine traditions of Tatmadaw. Entry songs must be in accord with military song composing techniques."

                          Marching make you feel depraved?
                                     Write some songs for Burma Shave!

Words of the entry song with its ten typed copies and an origin of its music notes attached to the cassette or reel with brief autobiography of the entrant and the singer plus three passport size colour photos must be sent to SHMMSCWCOPAC secretary U Ko Ko Htwe no later than 20 December."

The Redcoats aren't coming

Ruling that the heavily armed creatures are full of fluids , TSA officials have banned the sale of takeaboard  lobsters  at  Logan Airport

Interviewed on condition of anonymity at the Union Oyster House,a TSA gourmand reports : “ The ban on lobster travel represents no infringement of crustacean civil liberties.

As unreconstructed redcoats , lobsters remain subject to the Commonweath's Alien and Sedition Acts.The wearing of lobster bibs by passengers is also forbidden in keeping with the new DHS ban on cotton, hemp, and linen clothing . Such fabrics contain cellulose, which can be combined with nitrogen, an ingredient of airport air found in fertilizer bombs, to create guncotton. a deadly explosive which figured in Boer terrorist attacks in 1903."
SCARED WHITE  by the TSA's hair-raising ruling , a terrified lobster surrenders at Logan

 

Last Gas Before Pluto

                           The Hydrocarbon Lakes of Titan    European Space Agency

The Oil Glut At The End Of The Universe

 

By Russell Seitz   

 

There was  more to last  summer’s nostalgia binge than the Rolling Stones and The Beachboys. Paul Ehrlich was back on the air. At the height of the last ‘energy crisis’, the  Neomalthusian population bomber predicted  global starvation and the implosion of  natural gas supplies by the time  Mick Jagger turned  40 . No such luck, so  Ehrlich turned to warning of a mass extinction of Republicans . But even as he and former next president gore were exhorting us to  repent ,and trade in  our limos, Lear  and Escalades for Segways and Amtrak seats, a funny thing happened on the way to Saturn .  The space probe that alit on its smog shrouded moon Titan may have changed everything , again. Civilization is about to clash with a Titanic oil glut.

 
Titan is awash with liquid hydrocarbons, but the Huygens Lander has found no sign of life, which means finders keepers for NASA’s proprietors. That means us, and the cameras show a planet-scape  Albert Beirstadt  might have painted to decorate the board room of Standard Oil. Sure it's cold outside on Titan , but  this week, Earthly science jourals are abuzz --there’s some kind of atmosphere -- a mixture so rich that the rain on the plain is mostly methane.

The Biggest Picture

Here is the first map of  most of the mass in the observable universe.
New techniques allow the drawing of contours between regions of equally weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies, caused by intervening distortion of spacetime by dark matter drawing ordinary matter after it . This may have formed  the  filament and clump structures whence star and galaxy evolution proceeded not too long after the Big Bang. Details in this week's Nature, Nobel prize coming soon to a decade near you.

In Kazakhstan did Borat's Khan...

A stately pleasure dome decree.........
Dearer than Dearest Leader Nursultan Nazarbayev moved  Kazakhstan's capital  from Almaty to Astana a decade ago, but more grandiose plans are afoot

Kazakhstan has unveiled a new architectural project for its capital Astana -- a giant transparent tent that will contain an indoor city.

The 150m-high (500ft) dome, designed by UK architect Norman Foster, will be built in just over a year.The tent is being made from special material that absorbs sunlight to create the effect of summer inside....

Underneath, in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses. The idea is to recreate summer, so that when the outside temperature is -30C, the residents of the Kazakh capital can play outdoor tennis..."  Thanks to Things for bringing  Xanadu up to date

 

IN FROM THE WARM

The Nuclear Winter Meltdown, (see below) has given rise to a warm exchange with Eric Hundman of the Center for Defense Information : http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003108.html

When I have finished reading the second of the  new studies by Robock et al.  dealing with the injection of 5 teragrams or so of soot into model atmospheres  I may  draft a formal response to submit to the peer reviewed literature  in which they appeared. Right now, I'm waiting for the Harvard library system to awake from its customary two-week  Yuletide nap to review the refernces in the first.

It is no small irony that if one takes these papers , er, interesting, assumptions about the lifetime of and distribution of stratospheric aerosols to heart, one must take Paul Crutzen's proposal for using sulfate precursors to intervene in climate change very seriously indeed. On the other hand, in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm , Carl Sagan  predicted a global climatic impact from multiteragram soot emissions from the Kuwaiti petroleum fires on ABC News  Nightline. Sagan said smoke from the sooty holocaust would loft into the upper atmosphere and  disrupt the monsoons , creating a disasterous Asian famine. Others objected that instead of being  lofted by solar heating, the soot would be be washed out of the atmosphere by rainfall. Three days later, black rain began falling over Iran and a normal  monsoon season followed. Instead of a global catastophe, as modeled in 1983, and by Robock et al.

The image above  is the record of the limited spread of the real world smoke from the Kuwait holocaust : click to enlarge

Is there an Engineer in the House ?

At last count, Congress Assembled contains two physicists, two chemists, two biologists, one geologist, 234 lawyers and an astronaut, putting  the lawyers within striking distance of an absolute majority . No other profession approaches this 43.5% plurality, and under quorum rules only lawyers can construe, for they wrote them themselves, it usually constitutes a de facto majority.

Science has  a fierce anthropological identity, and like the law, a pecking order of its own. Lawyers did not invent Physics Envy --ask around academe and you will find any geologist worth his salt considers himself the equal of any 10 of his colleagues, and each of them will assert  that any oilfield hand is twice as good as a physics whiz, for without geophysics, physicists wouldn't have a planet to stand on.

Physicists in turn sniff that they are universally acknowledged to be worth 11 chemists each, for such was the ratio in the Manhattan Project. This cuts no mustard with biologists, who 

And the winner is :

1st Place in the 2006 Darwin Awards has gone to a Brazillian garage employee who tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. When this technique proved ineffective, he tried pounding the recalcitrant RPG with a sledgehammer. Its explosion took out one other man, six cars and the repair shop .Finding 14 more RPG's nearby, police concluded the missile was being broken up for scrap metal.      It is now.

Hot stuff in the Big Cold

A HOT DAY ON ENCELADUS

 As much as we love natural history , we hold  environments that would kill us in short order in limited esteem. Living on the Earth’s well-shielded surface ,at the bottom of a virtual ocean of air,  we rarely encounter materials that have suffered the ravages of irradiation in the vaccum of deep space We're used to a fraction of one rad a year of background radiation, , but the state of nature elsewhere in the solar system is far more hostile ,including the moons of its giant planets.

 Jupiter and Saturn have immense magnetospheres , and radiation belts that are to  Earth's Van Allen belt as a blast furnace is to a toaster oven. Close to Jupiter, space  is filled with particles enough to deliver up to 10 rads an hour , and the thousand rad flux on Europa would  deliver enough Grays (Joules of absorbed ionizing energy) to bring you to death's door in an hour.

On Saturn’s moon  Enceladus, the environment is almost as hostile, because while Saturn traps solar wind ions and electrons at a somewhat lower density,  its  moons sweep up  disproportionate amounts of radiation damage because  its magnetosphere can trap energetic solar wind particles for years, and focus cosmic rays, amplifying the particle flux. If cells perish in hours out in the ionizing heat of the Big Cold, what happens to inorganic dust exposed over geological time? to find out,  Read on, or take a look at  Seitz et al: 'Xenomict energy in cold solids in space' Naturwissenschaften, March 2006