Mylos

Western Europe has very moderate winters compared to North American coastal regions at the same latitude, with a whopping 15°C (27°F) difference. New York is at about the same latitude as Rome, but its winters are considerably colder than those of Paris or London, which are at the same latitude as Québec or Newfoundland.

Conventional wisdom claims this is due to the regulating effects of the Gulfstream, that acts as a heat pump between both sides of the Atlantic ocean.

New research from Columbia (more details available from The Independent) debunks this theory. Apparently, most of the difference is due to atmospheric effects, and half of that due to global wind patterns whose meanderings are shaped by the Rocky Mountains (in simulations where the Rockies are flattened, Western Europe gets 9°C colder).The Gulfstream actually has only a very minor and almost negligible contribution to the difference.

I find it really amazing how mountains 9 time zones away can influence the climate so dramatically. It is a small world, after all.

Yamaha announced they will exit the CD-RW drive market. They make the excellent CRW-F1 drive, which is unique in that is capable of imprinting messages such as titles in the unused portion of the disc. The user interface for this “Disc@T2” feature is somewhat clunky, but this is a great feature that is easily worth the price premium in my opinion. Unfortunately, it seems my opinion is not shared and most people would rather pay less for a commodity than pay for innovation.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, Kenwood discontinued its line of 72x CD-ROM drives a year or two ago. When mine failed, I had no spare and no alternative but to get a noisier, slower Sony 52x. The Kenwood drives managed this by using a Zen Research beam splitter head to read multiple tracks in parallel, and thus did not need to rotate the disc as fast and induce as much vibration as conventional designs.

This time, I am prepared and I am hoarding 2 of these Yamaha drives before stocks run out…

And now for a slightly different take on the Columbia disaster, and the recriminations that started soon after.

After the Challenger accident in 1986, a commission was convened to investigate. One of its members was the Physics Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman, who recounts the commission’s work, and the obstacles entrenched NASA administrators put in its path, in his second book of memoirs What Do You Care What Other People Think? (a sequel to Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, both make for a rollicking good read and are included in the anthology Classic Feynman).

I am sure many of Feynman’s trenchant observations will remain relevant as the various commissions reveal the tensions between (expensive) safety requirements for the shuttle (specially in terms of the shuttle project’s human infrastructure), and the cost overruns of that white elephant in the sky, the International Space Station…

Many NASA critics question the need for human involvement for tasks that could be done just as well by cheaper and expendable robots (no life support systems needed). But apparently NASA’s bureaucrats have decided only the drama of humans cavorting in space will hold the public’s attention long enough to fund the space program. To quote Jerry Pournelle (I don’t usually agree with his politics, but here I think he is right):

Saturn was the most powerful machine ever made by man; and NASA took two working Saturns and laid them out as lawn ornaments so that they would not compete with Space Station and Shuttle. This was deliberate destruction of the people’s property, but those who did it were promoted, not sent to prison where they ought to be. Perhaps that is too strong: but they ought to be dismissed with prejudice, barred from ever working on any government or government financed or government approved project whatever. It was done for pure politics to ensure the need for Shuttle. And it was criminal.

I shot a sample roll of Kodak’s new Ektachrome E100GX film. It is marketed as a fine-grained and sharp film, clearly to challenge the current dominance of Fuji Velvia and Provia 100F (RDPIII), with similar specs to Provia, at least on paper.

Here are a few small 256×256 crops of 2900dpi scans I made on my Nikon Coolscan IVED scanner. I deliberately exaggerated the grain structure by applying equalization in Photoshop.

Velvia	E100GX
Provia	Provia pushed 2 stops

Keep in mind this test is highly unscientific since the crops represent different scenes with different contrast levels and colors.

I used Bluetooth for the first time today, to Hotsync my Palm Tungsten T with my laptop using a D-Link DBT-120 USB Bluetooth adapter. Pretty spiffy, and not much slower than standard USB synchronization.

Update (2003-01-30):

I have also synchronized my new SonyEricsson T68i Bluetooth-enabled cell phone with Outlook, as well as with iSync on my iMac G4. The process is painfully slow (probably due to sluggish software), but the end result is pretty cool. It seems Bluetooth is where USB was in 1995, i.e. barely functional drivers and not that reliable (my Sony phone has a tendency to unpair itself from my Tungsten T or my PC), but it has potential. You will just have to wait a couple of years until driver support migrates deep into the OS (unless you use a Mac, of course).