jfiore
Posts by this author
July 26, 2007
And now for something completely different:
There are a lot of intelligent folks out there in sci-blog gadget land, so please allow me to pick your brains for a moment.
I am looking for some recommendations on a DV camera. I am looking for a fairly basic unit but not one that is totally stripped.…
July 25, 2007
This week's NOVA Science NOW on PBS has an interesting piece on the Kryptos sculpture in front of CIA headquarters. The segment does a decent job of showing some of the basic techniques used such as substitution and transposition, in just a few minutes.
I am not a cryptographer but it is an area I…
July 16, 2007
Last Sunday was the 30th annual Boilermaker 15k road race in lovely Utica, NY. This is perhaps the biggest event in central NY during the summer. This year, the Boilermaker attracted over 12,000 entrants along with an elite field of national and international talent. In other words, it's not your…
July 16, 2007
It's amazing the things you can learn from a simple quiz on a morning radio show. But not the item that was intended, that is. A station that my wife listens to while getting ready for work often has one of those "Seventh caller who gets this question correct wins free tickets to the phone…
July 12, 2007
Curious about what's inside an iPhone? Well, the good folks at Audio Design Line (via EE Times) have a teardown.
Mind you, it's not like the old days when you could just pop off the cover of your new electronic doohickey and look at the manufacturer's part numbers on the chips. These are the days…
July 11, 2007
There is a darkly humorous thread at letsrun.com, a very popular site for runners, which may be of interest.
The upshot is that a surprising number of people are saying that they do not wash their hands after using restrooms and arguing that they are better off because of it. I don't think there…
July 2, 2007
An earlier installment noted the large sums of cashola being used in the construction of what can nominally be described as Multimedia Entertainment Venues for Christ (MEVCs). The Gardendale First Baptist Church in Alabama dropped $110,000 for a Yamaha digital mixing console for example, let alone…
June 29, 2007
Today, small, simple, pale white, and dare I say it, almost virginal. But soon, red, swollen and sweet on the tongue.
Yes, we're talking Rosaceae fragaria, strawberries. This particular cultivar is an everbearing variety called Berry Basket. About a half dozen plants sit in two long window boxes…
June 28, 2007
Shifting gears from the usual ranting at the Refuge, I came across a nice series of articles from Audio Design Line on the usage and selection of bypass capacitors in electronic circuits. This is a topic with which my students often seem to have difficulty. There is a nice tutorial on the modeling…
June 27, 2007
21.285 km in one hour. That's what legendary Ethiopian distance ace Haile Gebrselassie managed at the Ostrava Golden Spike meet today. Full details here
This is roughly equivalent to an average velocity of 4:32 per mile, 13.23 MPH, 5.91 meters per second, or 354.8 meters per minute. I could add…
June 27, 2007
UK gold medalist in the triple jump, Jonathon Edwards, long known for his wear-it-on-your-sleeve Christianity, has admitted to apostasy. Here is an article in The Times Online. It's a good read. Here's an out take:
Once you start asking yourself questions like, 'How do I really know there is a God…
June 22, 2007
The common foxglove Digitalis purpurea is certainly one to affect your heart. Literally.
Foxglove is, of course, the source of the cardiac drug digitalin. Ingestion of foxglove can be fatal, so no munching, no matter how much you may be attracted to it. Symptoms may include nausea, hallucinations…
June 15, 2007
Lily fair, lily fair, around the house, everywhere! Yes, we've got all types: Oriental lilies , Tiger llilies, Daylilies, and the ever-so-shy but pungent Lily of the Valley.
Interestingly, most of those mentioned above aren't true lilies (the exception being the Asian or Oriental types). I can…
June 14, 2007
Yesterday, I mentioned the Fast Food Friends program at Gardendale First Baptist Church in Alabama. Here is how they describe it on their website:
It is a creative way to show people in our community the love of Christ. You ask how does it work? The next time that you go to your local fast…
June 13, 2007
Audio is where I spend much of my time, both professionally and as a hobby. In fact, quite a few years ago I used to design public address systems and components (most notably loudspeaker systems and subwoofers). That venture didn't last too long because I discovered that many people just didn't…
June 11, 2007
Aussie Craig "Buster" Mottram won the Pre Classic 2 mile this weekend in a meet record 8:03.5. Apparently, Buster has a certain anatomical secret which allows for such quick running, and which he mentions during the interview at the end of the race.
Actually, I'm a little surprised that it didn't…
June 5, 2007
The 2005 Energy Policy Act is known by some as being written by the energy lobby and by others as containing things down right goofy. One provision creates what are known as energy transmission corridors. Supposedly, the idea is to lower energy costs and increase security (is there anything that's…
June 1, 2007
Thanks to commenter Derelict from my Summer Reading entry, I listened to a talk with Christopher Hitchens on the Dennis Prager show. There was one particular item that caught my ear. Prager posed the following question:
"If you were in a strange city in the USA at night and you saw ten men coming…
May 31, 2007
Here's an interesting piece from Audio Design Line regarding a new file format just released from Beatnik. The format is said to produce files one-tenth the size of MP3 files and is intended for narrow bandwidth phones in emerging markets.
The format, called Mobile XMF, would work in conjunction…
May 30, 2007
Today is my second official day of summer vacation. Now that the academic year is complete I get to figure out what to read over the summer. Unfortunately, I didn't get much reading in over the past year as I spent a good deal of time developing and teaching a new course, Science of Sound, along…
May 23, 2007
I caught a portion of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing regarding the California CO2 Waiver on CSPAN last night. You can read Senator Boxer's (majority) opening comments here and Senator Inhofe's (minority) opening comments here.
It's bad enough when Inhofe says things…
May 23, 2007
"Visualize! Visualize! Visualize!" is a cry often heard by athletes. The idea is to picture a performance in the mind, and by repeatedly doing so, help insure a successful result when the times comes for the real thing. For example, as a runner I might try to visualize striding smoothly and…
May 22, 2007
The crossroads of Dada and fun: "Found humor". I love weird typos and the accidental use of words to create something inadvertently rib-tickling. Check out this item from the newsletter of a local running club:
I don't know about you, but I'd like to join this club just so that I can cast a vote…
May 18, 2007
They say good things (or is it bad?) come in threes. Check out Hitchens' article in Slate. Here's an exerpt:
All bigots and frauds are brothers under the skin. Trying to interrupt the fiesta of piety on national television on the night of Falwell's death, I found myself waiting while Ralph Reed…
May 18, 2007
Some more priceless quotes from Chris Hitchens regarding the late Jerry Falwell, including "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox".
Thanks to Bill from Dover and mg for the heads-up.
May 16, 2007
Christopher Hitchens tears into the hypocrisy of the late Jerry Falwell with Anderson Cooper.
May 15, 2007
So by now you've probably heard that Jerry Falwell has died. What I'm going to be looking for over the next couple of days is what others are going to be saying, and what that says about them. Let's start with Senator McCain:
"Dr. Falwell was a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his…
May 14, 2007
Back around 1987 I picked up a Commodore Amiga 1000. This was an interesting little box for home computers of the day. In the late eighties the typical home/office PC was running MS-DOS and had a whopping 640k bytes of memory. The Amiga didn't look like the average home computer and it certainly…
May 11, 2007
MarkCC over at Good Math, Bad Math offers up some enjoyable elements from time to time. Between the good and the bad, is there space for humorous literal math?
Yes, it's final exam time here at the college and I received the following from a colleague (the exam paper is not from one of his courses…
May 2, 2007
PBS/Nova ran a show on Sir Isaac Newton the other night entitled Newton's Dark Secrets. Interesting though it was, for years I have claimed that Sir Isaac's true "dark secret" was that he learned how to travel through time. Yep. Right up to the 1970's. He wanted to be a rock legend...
"Newton,…