MagicJack

The YMax magicJack is a USB device that allows you to make phone calls with a regular analog phone (corded, cordless or headset), your home computer and a high-speed Internet connection.

Installing my magicJack was a breeze. I plugged it into my MacBook Pro, configured the preferences and input my physical address for the included 911 feature. The whole thing was ready to go in less than five minutes. I made the first phone call to my mom to discuss Mother’s Day plans. She couldn’t tell at all that I was calling from the Internet. I was thoroughly impressed with the sound quality - it sounds the same as a regular land line.

-- Alison Stewart, Click Chick, 5/21/08

polar bears endangered species

Once a symbol of Arctic wildlife's fierce resilience, the polar bear is now so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the US government placed the creature on the endangered species list yesterday.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the bears' habitat was literally melting below their feet. Bears depend almost exclusively on sea ice to hunt for ringed seals and other prey. Yet Arctic ice coverage fell to record low levels last year, and scientists predict it could decline another 30 percent by mid-century, he said.

The government declared the bears as "threatened," the first time an animal has been placed on the endangered species list primarily because of global warming. The designation means the bear is at risk of eventually becoming extinct and requires the government to protect it.

Jet Wings

Playing to a mesmerized audience, Swiss pilot and adventurer (some might say nutcase) Yves Rossy has soared above the Alps with homemade jet-powered wings strapped to his back.

Rossy, an extreme sports guy who has spent years assembling his wings, casually stepped out of an airplane at 7,500 feet, unfolded the wings and quickly passed from free fall to mellow glide. He then fired up the wings' engines and accelerated to more than 180 mph.

As if that weren't cool enough, Rossy showed off a bit, making a few dives, some figure eights and a 360-degree barrel roll before landing at an airfield near Lake Geneva.

"That was to impress the girls," he said after the five-minute flight.

Uninstalling a printer

I'm about to install a new printer since my old has broken. I guess I could just add it, but I figure I'd do it the right way by uninstalling the old one first.

There's actually a proper way to do it according to PC Answers.

It's a three-step process.

1) remove software installed with the printer with add/remove from the control panel
2) delete the printer
3) delete the printer drivers

Actually there's a better way for step 1 with HP All-In-One printers (link found while googling "uninstall HP Director). Just click Uninstall from the HP section in the Start Menu.

And just to be safe, I'm going to back up the My Scan folder before uninstalling.

* * *

OK, I ran the uninstall. What it did was uninstall the printer and drivers. But HP ImageZone and HP Director are still there. The question is whether I should uninstall these before installing the new printer. I would imagine the install would recognize the software and update it if need be. So I won't.

[5/22] WTH, I'll uninstall Imagezone from the control panel. Hey it got rid of both ImageZone and HP Director. All that's left is HP Software Update. I'll uninstall that too from the control panel. OK, that worked. The only thing that's left in the start menu is HP Digital Imaging Monitor and HP Image Zone Fast Start. And those are now shortcuts to nowhere. And I just manually deleted those items from the Start Menu. OK ready to install.

Vista eating resources?

When setting up a Vista notebook, I noticed a process eating up CPU usage. It turned out to be Vista itself or the new Vista interface.

What you can do to use the Classic Windows theme. Here's how vistafaqs.com explains it (and other things you can do).

Reverting to the windows "Classic" theme can also cutback on CPU and GPU load to help improve perfomance by making the graphics less consuming. To do this right click on the desktop and go to "Personalize" you can then click on "Theme" and change it to "Windows Classic".

The Food Crisis

You just know that something is astray when Afghan poppy growers begin to switch from opium to wheat. According to the Independent newspaper here in the UK, that's exactly what is now happening. I have no desire to enter into a pound for pound risk/reward analysis of producing wheat versus opium. However, the consequences of the rapid rise in energy and agricultural commodity prices are far reaching and perhaps not as well understood as they should be.

Timers

For some reason, I've always like timers. Maybe I like to see things running backwards or see things come to an end (a clock running forward doesn't end).

Anyway, from frwr-news, here's the best software timer I've used so far (not that I've tried that many).

TimeAfterTime v1.1 - 1830 KB
Run on Win98,WinME,WinNT 4.x,WinXP,Windows2000
A Multi-Timer which allows you to launch upto 6 simultaneous count up/down, stopwatch or alarm clock timers. Set timers to trigger once or recurring. Assign separate announcements for each timer - select from those that come with the application (via drop-down list) or allocate your own WAV files. Special algorithms ensure sound announcements do not cut each other off or overlap. Windows management features to help you handle many running timers.

Free Software

There are a number of places where you can get free software (besides good ole download.com) that sometimes are announced at frwr-news.

So I have started this post so I have someplace to list them.

trinityedusystems [frwr-news, 5/7/08]

Address Book

Since I'm using passwordsafe to store and retrieve my passwords online, how about someplace to store phone numbers?

Well, how about the Yahoo address book in their email? (Or the address books in any of the email services.) Duh.

OK, I'll try it and how well that works.

Yeah, I see I already has some old information there. It's called Contacts.

Airport Extreme

Keith emailed that they are unable to connect their IBM laptop to the Apple router which is an Airport Extreme. He dropped off the laptop, but since I don't have the router, it's going to be hard to figure.

I remember Dexter and Gina had the same kind of problem. I called Gina and Dexter returned the call in the evening. Dexter said they had to add the IP address for the laptop. Gina came on and said the encryption had to match and they had to take the laptop to the Apple store to reset the IP address on it (was my interpretation anyway).

I see they have the AirPort Extreme Setup Guide on the internet. And so is the Airport Utility.

OK. We'll see what happens on Monday when I plan to go over.

[4/28] Well I couldn't get it to work. The Apple Utility software couldn't find the Airport. The IBM Connect software (whatever it's called) could find it, but the signal was very weak. I thought the IBM software might have been interfering with Apple software, so I uninstalled it. This cleared up the logon screen problem (the Welcome Screen option was disabled, so you had the classic logon screen where you type the user name and password). But it still didn't work. Then I figured I'd uninstall the Apple software and see if I could logon with the raw Windows interface. But then it couldn't find anything and I noticed the wireless light on the laptop didn't go on. I managed to recover the IBM connect software with System Recovery (luckily, because not all the System Recoveries worked) and the light reappeared. But still no luck connecting. I even tried connecting with the neighbor's routers, some of which had no encryption set. But still no luck.

Finally, we wound up plugging in the laptop into the router with an Ethernet cable (had to visit Radio Shack to buy one). And that worked. With the cable in, the Apple Utility could see the router, but when I pulled out the cable, no dice. So, I'm guessing something's wrong with the wireless card on the laptop, since I wasn't able to connect to anything wireless. And the Mac connects to the Airport fine. Well at least they got both of their computers on the internet now.

(I gotta get me a laptop one of these days, so I can troubleshoot these problems better.)

Gator Blood

Someday an alligator might save your life.

Researchers in Louisiana say they've discovered unique antibiotic proteins in the blood of American alligators that can kill a wide variety of deadly bacteria, halt the spread of common infections and perhaps even stop HIV.

If they're right and they're able to sequence the genetics of gator blood, the researchers say superdrugs based on their findings might be available within 10 years.

Green Gasoline

Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.

Reporting in the cover article of the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.

"It is likely that the future consumer will not even know that they are putting biofuels into their car," said Huber. "Biofuels in the future will most likely be similar in chemical composition to gasoline and diesel fuel used today. The challenge for chemical engineers is to efficiently produce liquid fuels from biomass while fitting into the existing infrastructure today."

Genealogy Programs

Family Tree Builder is our genealogy software for Windows. It offers excellent quality, supports 23 languages and is one of the best genealogy software programs you'll ever find. [via frwr-news, 4/2/08]

GenealogyJ is a viewer and editor for genealogic data, suitable for hobbyist, family historian and genealogy researcher. GenJ supports the Gedcom standard, is written in Java and offers family tree, table, timeline views and more. GenJ is free software so it can be redistributed and/or be modified under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation. [frwr-news, 5/21/08]

Legacy Family Tree is your complete family history solution.
for Window 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, or Windows XP. The feature-rich Legacy 4.0 makes it easy to preserve your genealogical information. Family trees containing millions of people can be recorded, displayed and reported in a variety of styles and formats. Legacy 4.0 includes all standard genealogical reports, as well as calendars, timelines, questionnaires, research logs and a multitude of blank forms and more! [frwr-news, 4/5/10]

Ahnenblatt is a free and easy-to-use genealogy software for Windows. It is designed to manage your genealogy data and to generate impressive reports and graphical trees. [frwr_news, 6/11/10]

take an inventory of your computer

The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.

[from Bill Husted, 2/29/08]

Vista is an upgrade??

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

* * *

[4/26/08] Microsoft's operating systems run most personal computers around the globe and are a cash cow for the world's largest software maker. But you'd never confuse a Windows user with the passionate fans of Mac OS X or even the free Linux operating system.

Unless it's someone running Windows XP, a version Microsoft wants to retire.

Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.



Save XP Petition

plastic bottles vs. the environment

According to the New York Times, more than 90 percent of the environmental impact from a plastic bottle is already done before the bottle is opened, because plastic bottles have a surprisingly high carbon footprint.

Production of the 29 billion polyethylene terephthalate (PET) water bottles used in the United States (about one bottle per person every four days) requires nearly 900,000 tons of the plastic, the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil annually.

But that is just the cost of the bottles. There are other costs in the production of bottled water.

Ethanol Demand in U.S. Adds to Food, Fertilizer Costs

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. plans to replace 15 percent of gasoline consumption with crop-based fuels including ethanol are already leading to some unintended consequences as food prices and fertilizer costs increase.

About 33 percent of U.S. corn will be used for fuel during the next decade, up from 11 percent in 2002, the Agriculture Department estimates. Corn rose 20 percent to a record on the Chicago Board of Trade since Dec. 19, the day President George W. Bush signed a law requiring a fivefold jump in renewable fuels by 2022.

Increased demand for the grain helped boost food prices by 4.9 percent last year, the most since 1990, and will reduce global inventories of corn to the lowest in 24 years, government data show. While advocates say ethanol is cleaner than gasoline, a Princeton University study this month said it causes more environmental harm than fossil fuels.

Oil prices tripled since the end of 2003, causing the government to consider alternative fuels. Now, the competition for corn is leading to higher costs for food companies, raising prices for everything from cattle to dairy products.

Corn doubled in the past two years, touching a record $5.29 a bushel today in Chicago. The price of young cattle sold to feedlots gained 8.7 percent in the past year, reaching a record $1.1965 a pound on Sept. 6 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Average whole milk rose 26 percent to $3.871 a gallon in January from a year earlier, the Department of Labor said yesterday.

``For thousands of years, humans grew food and ate it,'' said Andrew Redleaf, 50, chief executive officer of Whitebox Advisors LLC, a Minneapolis hedge fund that manages $3 billion. ``Now we are burning crops to make fuel.''

Researchers led by Timothy Searchinger at Princeton University said their study showed greenhouse-gas emissions will rise with ethanol demand. U.S. farmers will use more land for fuel, forcing poorer countries to cut down rainforests and use other undeveloped land for farms, the study said.

Searchinger's team determined that corn-based ethanol almost doubles greenhouse-gas output over 30 years when considering land-use changes. Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association in Washington, said the study used a flawed model and overestimated how much land will be needed.

Ethanol is important in reducing emissions, ending energy dependence on the Middle East and creating jobs in rural areas, Dinneen said today at the USDA conference.

``There are still some who want us to choose between food and fuel,'' said Dinneen, whose organization represents ethanol producers including Archer Daniels Midland Co. ``I don't think we have to choose.'' Research shows cellulosic ethanol made from grasses and crop waste may contribute 21 billion gallons by 2022, and farmers will be able to boost yields, he said.

Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions.”

Party-on Blu-ray

[2/20/08] Toshiba will discontinue its HD DVD products, it said Tuesday, handing victory to rival high definition disc format Blu-ray Disc. The company will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.

Recent changes in the market prompted the decision, Toshiba said. Early this year, Warner Bros. said it would stop issuing movies on HD DVD in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. The Hollywood studio was one of three major studios remaining in the HD DVD camp, and its defection created widespread belief that the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc was now over. More recently, major U.S. retail chain Wal-Mart announced it would phase out the sale of HD DVD products, moving to exclusivity with Blu-ray Disc.


LAS VEGAS -- The International Consumer Electronics Show is turning out to be a celebration party for Blu-ray, the high-definition format that Sony Corp. backed, and a wake for a rival movie disc technology pushed by Toshiba Corp.

Just two months ago, Sony CEO Howard Stringer said the fight between Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD was at a "stalemate," and expressed a wish to travel back in time to avert it.

The impasse was broken Friday by Warner Bros. Entertainment, the last major studio to put out movies in both formats. It announced it was ditching HD DVD, and from May on, would only publish on Blu-ray and traditional DVD.

The decision puts a strong majority of the major studios, five versus two, in the Blu-ray camp.

Asked Monday at the show if the Warner announcement decides the format war, Stringer said: "I never put up banners that say 'Mission Accomplished.'" But his cheerful delivery belied his words.

By contrast, the main media event scheduled for the show by the North American HD DVD Promotional Group, which includes Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., was canceled because of Warner's defection.

Everyday Mysteries

Did you ever wonder why a camel has a hump? If you can really tell the weather by listening to the chirp of a cricket? Or why our joints make popping sounds? These questions deal with everyday phenomena that we often take for granted, but each can be explained scientifically.

Everyday Mysteries will help you get the answers to these and many other of life's most interesting questions through scientific inquiry. In addition, we will introduce you to the Library of Congress' rich collections in science and technology.

All of the questions presented on this Web site were asked by researchers and answered by librarians from the Library's Science Reference Services. [via frwr-news]

Melinda Gates goes public

Of all the tricks that life can play, it's hard to imagine any stranger than what befell Melinda French. Today she is living in a gargantuan high-tech mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, married to the richest man in America - and giving billions of dollars away.

Has global warming stopped?

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.<! brknews->

w00t

Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to "w00t."

"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

Merriam-Webster's president, John Morse, said "w00t" was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.

"It shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other," Morse said.

Gamers commonly substitute numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, Morse says, creating what they call "l33t speak" — that's "leet" when spoken, short for "elite" to the rest of the world.

For technophobes, the word also is familiar from the 1990 movie "Pretty Woman," in which Julia Roberts startles her date's upper-crust friends with a hearty "Woot, woot, woot!" at a polo match.

Arctic ice melting faster than expected

An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer — a sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One scientist even speculated that summer sea ice could be gone in five years.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years ago, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by the Associated Press (AP).

Just last year two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040. This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

"The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. "Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."

Use the Web for Faxing

Use the Web for Faxing
By SHELLY BANJO
October 28, 2007

Email has replaced faxing for many purposes. But for those times when you still need to receive a fax or send a document to someone else's fax machine, a number of Internet faxing sites offer free or inexpensive help.

At eFax.com, you can sign up for a free phone number for receiving faxes by choosing eFaxFree (under "Products, click on "Learn More"). Faxes arrive as attachments in your email inbox. Other free sites for receiving faxes include FaxDigits.com and k7.net.

Additional features, such as toll-free numbers and a variety of fax-sending options, come with a monthly fee package through eFax, FaxDigits and other sites including MyFax.com and TrustFax.com. For instance, MyFax.com charges $10 a month and provides online fax storage, faxing via email-equipped mobile phones, sending to multiple recipients and scheduled delivery.

To send an occasional fax for free, meanwhile, you might try FaxZero.com. You type in information about yourself and the recipient. Then you either type your message or attach a .doc, .xls or .pdf file (subject to size limits) and click "Send Free Fax Now." To send longer faxes or more than two faxes a day through FaxZero.com, the fee is $1.99.

To compare almost a hundred faxing sites by price and features, check out FaxPrices.com.

Write to Shelly Banjo at shelly.banjo@wsj.com

Mona Lisa had eyebrows?

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - For centuries, the "Mona Lisa" has beguiled art buffs unable to resist speculating on its origins and meaning. Now a French inventor claims to have some answers, including the fate of the enigmatic subject's famously missing eyebrows and lashes.

Geni

by Allan Hoffman, Newhouse News Service

I've always wanted to work on a family tree, but I've never had the time for it. Now I've found the way: Other people will do it for me.

This may work for you too.

An online startup, Geni, is bringing the social networking craze - yes, as in youth-oriented spots like MySpace and Facebook - to the sometimes stodgy world of genealogy. By building a family tree online with Geni's free service, you can easily share your family tree with any relative who has an e-mail address. When your relatives add names and dates to their family tree on Geni, these new branches will be added to your tree, too. If you get enough relatives working on this, you can have a family tree with hundreds or thousands of relatives.

SpiralFrog

It has finally come to this: labels are simply giving their music away.

A new Web site named SpiralFrog.com allows visitors with label approval to download music free of charge. It launched Monday in the U.S. and Canada after a beta-testing period.

The fine site features more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos, and promises hundreds of thousands more soon. It makes money through advertising, rather than by the 99-cent downloads popularized by Apple's iTunes.

The service, founded by Joe Mohen, pays record companies part of its advertising revenue. Thus far, Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, is the only major label to dip its tunes into SpiralFrog's pool.

Songs from several big acts can be found, including Maroon 5, Rihanna, Gwen Stefani, Weezer, Amy Winehouse and Kanye West. All the tracks from many albums are available (from the Who's "Who Sell Out" to Nirvana's "In Utero") so the content here is no small potatoes.

***

 SpiralFrog, the pioneering ad-supported music service, quietly closed down on Thursday. SpiralFrog's site went dark at about 4 p.m. PDT.

A source close to the company told CNET News that SpiralFrog has ceased operations and assets have been surrendered to creditors. To keep operations going last year, the company issued secured notes in order to borrow at least $9 million from several hedge funds and others.

SpiralFrog representatives weren't immediately available for comment.

New York-based SpiralFrog made a splash in August 2006 by attempting to offer music free of charge to the public while supporting the site through ad sales. Media outlets such as The New York Times, Reuters, and USA Today questioned whether the site might one day challenge Apple's iTunes.

Some argued that SpiralFrog's business model was the answer to illegal file sharing. But the model has yet to be proven. SpiralFrog is the second ad-supported service to shut down in 2009. Ruckus, which catered to college students, also shuttered operations.

Increase your RAM - free of cost

Now this is called a tip of the year! While working with the Task Manager I observed the following. You can also try it out.

• Start any application, say Word. Open some large documents.
  
• Now start the Task Manager processor tab and sort the list in descending order on Mem Usage. You will notice that Winword.exe will be somewhere at the top, using multiple MBs of memory. Note down the number.
  
• Now switch to Word and simply minimise it. (Do not use the Minimize All option of the task bar).
  
• Now go back to the Task Manager and see where Winword.exe is listed. Most probably you will not find it at the top. You will typically have to scroll to the bottom of the list to find Word. Now check out the amount of RAM it is using. Compare it with the original. Surprised? The memory utilisation has reduced by a huge amount.
  
• So where is the tip of the year? Simple — minimise each application that you are currently not working on by clicking on the Minimize button, and you can increase the amount of available RAM by a substantial margin. Depending upon the number and type of applications you use together, the difference can be as much as 50 percent of extra RAM—and all this is free of cost!

It is nothing unexpected actually. In any multitasking system, minimising an application means that it won’t be utilised by the user right now. Therefore, the OS automatically makes the application use virtual memory and keeps bare minimum amounts of the code in physical RAM. I have not tried it, but I am sure it would work exactly the same way even in earlier versions of Windows (and any other multitasking system).

jatropha

When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops — edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans — he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy.

“I thought it was a plant for old ladies to make soap,” he said.

But now that a plant called jatropha is being hailed by scientists and policy makers as a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels. By planting a row of jatropha for every seven rows of regular crops, Mr. Banani could double his income on the field in the first year and lose none of his usual yield from his field.

bye-bye batteries?

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 805km roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without petrol.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 80,5km of petrol-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

Sceptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.

Is your password safe?

We won't dwell on passwords today. But there is a way to test the one you use, to make sure it is secure. Go to this site - www.securitystats.com/tools/password.php - and enter a password. You'll be told just how secure that password is. If the bar turns red, the password is bad. If it's yellow, the password is weak. If it's in the green, so are you.

cleaning your LCD monitor

Q: Can you explain how to clean my new LCD monitor?

— Sarah Starr

A: Any of the commercial LCD screen cleaners sold at computer stores or online will work fine. You can also make your own cleaner. The best commercial cleaners contain a 50/50 mixture of water and isopropyl alcohol.

While there may be other ingredients listed, the alcohol/water mixture does the real work. It's better to spray it onto the screen rather than wipe it on. I use an old glass cleaner bottle that was thoroughly washed (using glass cleaner on an LCD screen is a bad idea). Use a soft, lint-free cloth and wipe from top to bottom, not in a circular motion. Never use a paper towel — it'll scratch the screen.

Second Life

Second Life at Sherman's Lagoon

How to tame the e-mail monster

E-MAIL, a blessing or curse? E-mail is one of the world's top communication tools. It is also our No. 1 annoyance.

Hoala Greevy, the creator of Hawaii-based PauSpam.com, reports that an average of 80 percent of all the e-mail we receive is either spam or viruses. What an incredible waste of time! Think how much more efficient we would be without the distraction of junk, spam, or advertising e-mails. Actually, e-mail that we do need to read is a distraction, too, and can become a virus in and of itself.

You can avoid these distractions by implementing a policy we've developed as to how to check e-mail. My coaching clients are gaining up to a full workday in free time by implementing this system which you can model to work best for you to maximize your time. But, be forewarned. This method challenges the e-mail addict.

First, check e-mail no more than three times a day, and do this at set times in your day.

When a new e-mail message comes through, don't stop what you're doing to attend to it. If you are guilty of checking your e-mail as soon as you hear the sound announcing that you have a new e-mail, you are not alone. It's almost like a trigger that reminds your brain, "Oh, a new e-mail just came in. I'd better check it. It could be important." Stop the temptation by turning off the e-mail announcement sound on your computer.

Install some type of spam-filtering software to combat that evil spam creature.

The next thing you want to do is to organize all your incoming e-mail.

» Folder No. 1: This is for clients. Your clients come first. They're the reason you're in business, and why they're in Folder No. 1.

» Folder No. 2 is for my partner's e-mail. Often, he asks questions that need to be acted on immediately. It could be about a client or a strategy that he wants support on. Other times, he's following up on e-mails that I have sent him. If you have a partner, or do business with someone in a strategic-partner manner, or with someone at that level whose e-mail needs to be responded to as soon as it comes in or within several hours, their e-mail would go in Folder No. 2.

» Folder No. 3: This is a low priority, read-later folder. Newsletters and e-zines that I subscribe to go into this folder. It's organized based on the particular title of the newsletter. This lets me get caught up with cutting-edge trends on my own time, without distracting me the minute it comes in.

Gates and Jobs old pals?

CARLSBAD - The words that come to mind when trying to describe tech titans Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't usually include "nostalgic," "sentimental" or "soft."

Yet in a historic joint appearance at the D: All Things Digital Conference on Wednesday, the two were at times overcome about their history together. Indeed, by the end, both men seemed choked up by the emotion of the moment.

Gates in particular took special pride in his role as co-founder and chairman of Microsoft. Even after being praised for his recent philanthropic efforts, Gates talked more about what he did in the technology industry than what his charitable foundation is doing now.

"The most important work I got a chance to be involved in - no matter what I do - is the personal computer," Gates said. "That's my life's work."

It's been quite a life for the two of them, and they have been at the center of the action for most of their careers. Jobs, co-founder and chief executive of Apple, noted that when they started working together in the mid-1970s, he and Gates were often the youngest people in the room. Now, he said, he's often the oldest.

Paraphrasing a Beatles song, he added, "You and I have memories that are longer than the road that stretches out ahead."

To be sure, the appearance wasn't a love fest. Jobs at times, as he's wont to do, seemed to get under Gates' skin.

At one point he tried to convince Gates that Apple isn't trying to be mean by poking fun at the "PC guy," the lovable loser who stands in sharp contrast to Apple's cool "Mac guy" in a popular series of commercials.

"The art of those commercials ... is for those guys to like each other," Jobs said. "The PC guy is what makes it all work, actually. It's worth thinking about."

Needless to say, Gates didn't appear to be convinced. In an interview with Newsweek earlier this year, he'd even questioned the ads' veracity.

Still, the two did show their mutual respect for each other. Gates, for instance, praised Jobs' aesthetic sense, noting that it sharply differed from his own sensibility, which is to approach problems from an engineering perspective.

"I'd give a lot to have Steve's taste - in terms of intuitive taste for people and products," he said. "The way he does things, it's just different. It's magical."

Similarly, Jobs said that Apple could have learned a lot from Microsoft's penchant for partnering with other companies in the industry. Partnering simply wasn't in Apple's DNA, and the company didn't learn how to do it until decades after its founding, he said.

"The funny thing is Microsoft's one of the few companies we were able to partner with (where) that actually worked for both companies," he said.

The conversation was moderated by longtime technology journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who organized the event, and took place in front of such luminaries as movie director George Lucas, domestic diva Martha Stewart and former AOL Chairman Steve Case.

The event marked the first time Jobs and Gates have made a joint public appearance since the 1997 Boston Macworld event, when Gates joined Jobs via teleconference to announce a landmark deal between their two companies. The previous time the two appeared together at a public event was in the early 1980s.

Jobs' participation in the event capped a long day for him and the company. Earlier in the day, the iconic CEO participated in a separate conversation with Mossberg. During that event, he announced that the company's Apple TV set-top box would soon allow users to watch YouTube videos from the Internet.

Meanwhile, Apple announced early Wednesday morning that it has added unprotected digital songs from music label EMI to its iTunes music store as part of an agreement the companies announced in April. The company also announced that it was adding course lectures and other education materials for download from the iTunes store.

The two tech titans have long been known for their rivalry. What isn't as well understood is that they and their companies also have a history of cooperation. Microsoft has been one of the most important software developers for the Macintosh, and the company arguably helped save Apple in 1997 with a $150 million investment and a commitment to continue developing its Office suite for the Mac.

On a personal level, Jobs and Gates were good enough friends in the 1980s to double date occasionally and for Gates to leave friendly prank calls on Jobs' answering machine.

That said, Jobs is well known for taking pot-shots at his company's bigger rival. And he didn't disappoint on Wednesday. The company's iTunes software is one of the most popular programs on computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system, Jobs noted in his conversation earlier in the day with Mossberg. Indeed, he said, some users have written to tell Apple that it's their favorite Windows application, he said.

"It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell," he said.

By Troy Wolverton
Mercury News
Article Launched: 05/30/2007 11:14:18 PM PDT

eBay parties on, but not Google

SAN FRANCISCO, June 13 — It had all the appearances of a marketing stunt gone awry, the Internet industry’s version of a wily playground taunt that quickly escalated into a tense standoff, until the taunter — Google, in this case — blinked.

Here’s what happened. As thousands of eBay’s largest sellers prepared to gather in Boston for their annual eBay-sponsored convention and party this week, Google, the Internet search and advertising giant, decided it would be a good idea to invite those sellers to its own party. Not just any party, either, but one to promote Google Checkout, a payment system that competes with the eBay-owned PayPal and which eBay has banned from its auctions.

“Let Freedom Ring,” read the invitation on an official Google blog. And in classic Google style, it promised “free food, free drinks, free live music — even free massages.”

That did not sit well with eBay, and early Wednesday the IDG News Service reported that eBay had decided to drop all the ads it places on Google’s search engine. EBay is the largest buyer of Google search ads, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

“I won’t comment whether that was directly tied to Google’s plans to have that party,” said Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. He said that eBay was simply running a test — something it does frequently — by shifting marketing dollars to determine the best way to attract users.

That’s not how some people interpreted eBay’s move. “I don’t think anyone believes that any more than we believe that eBay does not allow sellers to use Checkout because the service is unproven,” said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor.com, a company that helps store owners sell on multiple online sites, including eBay.

Regardless, by late Wednesday, Google rescinded the invitation to eBay sellers and canceled the party. “EBay Live attendees have plenty of activities to keep them busy this week in Boston, and we did not want to detract from that activity,” the Google blog read. “After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference.”

A Google spokesman declined to comment further.

“We are pleased that they apparently have seen that the party was inappropriate,” Mr. Durzy said. “It is not the way one partner should act with another.” Besides being rivals, the companies have a deal for Google to sell ads on eBay sites overseas.

Analysts said eBay’s decision to withdraw its ads is not likely to hurt the search giant. EBay spends less than $25 million on Google a quarter, said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, or only a tiny fraction of Google’s nearly $3.7 billion in revenue in the latest quarter.

Will eBay bring its ads back to Google? “We have no firm date for how long the experiment will go,” Mr. Durzy said.

[via Russ]

ethanol is not green

UNIVERSITY of California-Berkeley professor of civil engineering Tad W. Patzek has argued that the use of ethanol as a gas additive is a misguided public policy decision because it takes more fossil fuel to produce ethanol than the energy that comes from it.

David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, added that ethanol is not sustainable because its production from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production, but the vast majority of the subsidies go to large ethanol-producing corporations, not to farmers.

Worse yet, their analyses do not address the additional problem of wasting food for humans and animals by converting it to fuel.

Consumer Reports in October 2006 presented "The Ethanol Myth." The magazine tested identical large SUVs in gasoline and E85 versions. The overall mileage was 14 mpg for gasoline and 10 mpg for E85. The ethanol-powered vehicle required 40 percent more fuel!

Ethanol is not green: Civil engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University modeled a scenario in which all U.S. vehicles ran on E85 by 2020, and found that because ethanol produces more hydrocarbon emissions than gasoline, it causes an accelerated ozone formation and a 4.2 percent increase in deaths due to ozone.

Dark Energy

Scientists have long recognized that the universe has been growing larger since its origin 13.7 billion years ago in an extremely rapid expansion called the “Big Bang.” But we assumed that this expansion should be slowing down due to the pull of gravity. In 1998, however, two teams of astrophysicists discovered that the expansion is actually speeding up. They observed a mysterious form of “energy” that opposes gravity and is causing the galaxies throughout the universe to move apart faster and faster.

It’s as if you dropped this magazine and, instead of falling to the floor, it suddenly soared toward the ceiling. That would certainly signal the presence of an unexpected force of some kind. In the same way, the galaxies’ accelerated expansion signaled the presence of a previously unknown entity in the universe.

The discovery of “Dark Energy” is arguably the most important scientific breakthrough of the last 50 years. A full understanding of it eventually could have an effect on our daily lives.

cellulosic ethanol

[6/8/07] At a Brazilian ethanol conference June 4-5, Brazilian government-funded researchers said they have perfected a method of producing cellulosic ethanol that drastically reduces the cost of processing. At this point, the assertion -- and many other similarly optimistic claims made at the conference -- is unconfirmed. But should it prove true, the world could well be peeking over the horizon at a massive geopolitical, not to mention economic, shift.

[6/22/06] Cellulosic ethanol has all the advantages of corn-based ethanol - there is no difference in the ethanol, only in the way it's produced.

But unlike corn-based ethanol, cellulosic ethanol can be made from a variety of things that might otherwise be considered waste – sewage sludge, switchgrass, plant stalks, trees, even coal – virtually anything that contains carbon.

Ashworth said there are an estimated one billion tons of such material available in the U.S. every year, enough for 100 billion gallons of ethanol.

While it's not feasible to actually go out and collect every ounce of that one billion tons, he said it's not unreasonable to expect ethanol to replace 40 billion gallons of gasoline in the near future.

"There's a lot of venture capitol out there that's willing to invest in cellulosic ethanol," he said. "You're likely to see some plants built in the next 12 to 18 months."

[via InvestorGuide Daily]

Severn Suzuki

Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been doing her best to save her planet from environmental catastrophe since she was knee-high to a grasshopper.

At age six when most girls would be playing with their Barbie dolls Cullis-Suzuki was selling her father's hardcover books at lawn sales for 25 cents each to raise money for native land claims in British Columbia.

By age 10 she had co-founded ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization, with a group of like-minded grade six girlfriends at Lord Tennyson Elementary School in Vancouver.

Their first project was to buy a water filter for natives in the Malaysian tropical rain forest whose water supply was threatened by over logging and the effluence of an ever-encroaching population.

In 1992, when she was only 12, she brought world leaders to tears with a speech at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in which she chastised them for failing to protect her and her friends from the looming environmental catastrophe.

"I'm afraid to go out in the sun now because of holes in the ozone. I'm afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it," Cullis-Suzuki said in a six-minute speech heard around the world. "I used to go fishing with my dad in Vancouver until just a few years ago. We found the fish full of cancers."

Then she read out a checklist of the things the adults had failed to do to protect and preserve the health of the planet and urged them to get on with the task of making it fit for 5 billion people, or get out of the way.

"I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realize neither do you...if you don't now how to fix it then please stop breaking it," she pleaded with the delegates.

learning Chinese

Anyone who has tried to learn Chinese can attest to how hard it is to master the tones required to speak and understand it. And anyone who has tried to learn to play the violin or other instruments can report similar challenges. Now researchers have found that people with musical training have an easier time learning Chinese.

Writing in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience, researchers from Northwestern University say that both skills draw on parts of the brain that help people detect changes in pitch.

One of the study's authors, Nina Kraus, said the findings suggested that studying music "actually tunes our sensory system."

This means that schools that want children to do well in languages should hesitate before cutting music programs, Dr. Kraus said. She said music training might also help children with language problems.

Mandarin speakers have been shown to have a more complex encoding of pitch patterns in their brains than English speakers do. This is presumably because in Mandarin and other Asian languages, pitch plays a central role. A single-syllable word can have several meanings depending on how it is intoned.

For this study, the researchers looked at 20 non-Chinese speaking volunteers, half with no musical background and half who had studied an instrument for at least six years.

As they were shown a movie, the volunteers also heard an audiotape of the Mandarin word "mi" in three of its meanings: squint, bewilder and rice. The researchers recorded activity in their brain stems to see how well they were processing the sounds.

Those with a music background showed much more brain activity in response to the Chinese sounds.

The lead author of the study, Patrick C. M. Wong, said it might work both ways. It appears that native speakers of tonal languages may do better at learning instruments, Dr. Wong said.

Drunk on ethanol

By Matt Crenson, Associated Press

NEW YORK -- America is drunk on ethanol. Farmers in the Midwest are sending billions of bushels of corn to refineries that turn it into billions of gallons of fuel. Automakers in Detroit have already built millions of cars, trucks and SUVs that can run on it, and are committed to making millions more. In Washington, politicians have approved generous subsidies for companies that make ethanol.

And just this week, President Bush arranged with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for their countries to share ethanol production technology.

Even alternative fuel aficionados are surprised at the nation's sudden enthusiasm for grain alcohol.

"It's coming on dramatically; more rapidly than anyone had expected," said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

You'd think that would be good news, but it actually worries a lot of people.

Global Warming

[1/21/13] Travis Holum pens this article for the Motley Fool.

Like it or not, the evidence that the Earth's climate is changing is no longer up for debate in mainstream scientific communities. In less-scientific communities, it's also becoming harder to make the argument that some sort of climate change isn't present (no snow in Minnesota in January!). 

As might be expected, lots of comments.

[8/16/12] Somehow a debate on global warming erupted over on chucks_angels.

There was a number of scientists who are skeptical of global warming and I was wondering what percentage of scientists believe in global warming.

According to wikipedia

Since 2001, 32 national science academies have come together to issue joint declarations confirming anthropogenic global warming, and urging the nations of the world to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The signatories of these statements have been the national science academies of 32 countries.

Since 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,^[105] no scientific body of national or international standing rejects the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.

In an October 2011 paper published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, researchers from George Mason University analyzed the results of a survey of 489 scientists working in academia, government, and industry. The scientists polled were members of the American Geophysical Union or the American Meteorological Society and listed in the 23rd edition of American Men and Women of Science, a biographical reference work on leading American scientists. Of those surveyed, 97% agreed that that global temperatures have risen over the past century. Moreover, 84% agreed that "human-induced greenhouse warming" is now occurring. Only 5% disagreed with the idea that human activity is a significant cause of global warming.

This article (linked from the above wikipedia article) asserts that it's an American thing

As glaciers melt and island populations retreat from their coastlines to escape rising seas, many scientists remain baffled as to why the global research consensus on human-induced climate change remains contentious in the U.S.

The frustration revealed itself during a handful of sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, coming to a peak during a Friday session, "Science without Borders and Media Unbounded".

Near the forum’s conclusion, Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist Kerry Emanuel asked a panel of journalists why the media continues to cover anthropogenic climate change as a controversy or debate, when in fact it is a consensus among such organizations as the American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Chemical Society, American Meteorological Association and the National Research Council, along with the national academies of more than two dozen countries.

And here's an article summarizing a recent debate.

First an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, No Need To Panic About Global Warning, by a group of 16 scientists.

Then a courageous response by a Professor of Economics (courageous in the sense that a Professor of Economics tackles a groups of scientists in a field out of his specialty).

Then a response to the response by three of the 16 scientists (and a response to the response to the response).

[Don't know if there was a response to the response to the response to the response.]

[7/16/10 Brill] Critics, mostly nonscientists, were quick to pick out errors and falsifications in the original 2007 IPCC report that brought climate to the global stage, calling it "ClimageGate" and alluding to a worldwide conspiracy to "convince the public either with no facts or falsely created ones," as one source put it.

It is puzzling that the sparsest evidence will sway people to believe that the moon landings were faked; yet the abundant and competent evidence for anthropogenic climate change is disdained and discredited.

The existing data on the climatic system suggests a high probability that we are affecting the climate. Anyone with data to the contrary, this is the time to speak up and not just criticize that which you don't understand.

Climate change is arguably the most significant and difficult problem ever faced by the human race, and we are treating it like a political campaign. Are we the frogs who won't jump out of the boiling water, or are we the intelligent beings we claim to be who will continue to monitor as we hope for the best and plan for the worst?

Do I believe in climate change? No, what I believe is that our meager science has not afforded us an adequate understanding of nature, and I'll take the worst verifiable knowledge over the best unfounded speculation whether it supports my beliefs or not.

[5/7/10 Brill] Climate change is an issue that is likely to remain unsettled for an indefinite period of time. The geosystem is too big for us to understand at present with our puny minds and primitive computers.

If we are experiencing a catastrophic climate change, there is little doubt that the last humans left alive on the planet will still be debating and denying it.

But suppose we did discover that global climate change is occurring and there is the likelihood of a catastrophic future. What would we do?

There are several lines of mediation that geoengineers are studying. One is reducing the sunlight that reaches Earth's surface by reflecting it from mirrors in space or on the ground, or by dispersing reflective particles in the atmosphere. Another is removing pollutants such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides or whatever is deemed to be a cause that can be efficaciously mediated. A third is to reduce emissions and pollutants so that natural processes can re-establish a cooler equilibrium.

The first two present technical problems but are doable. The third presents sociopolitical problems that are unlikely to be solved in the near future.

[7/17/09 Brill] It might seem that to determine whether carbon dioxide influences Earth's heat budget is merely a matter of taking Earth's temperature, measuring carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, then looking for a correlation.

The correlation is there. Earth's temperature is increasing in concert with greenhouse gases. Can we be sure which is cause and which is effect?

Confounding the problem are multiple variables (carbon dioxide plays multiple roles in geochemistry) and nonlinearity of the relationship (at higher temperatures the oceans release stored greenhouse gases resulting in positive feedback). Because of these and other confounding factors and bias, we cannot easily determine causality and thus cannot predict with certainty what the effects of mitigation might be.

All of this and more is wrapped up into this complex political, social, scientific quandary we call global climate change.

[who knew Brill was a right-winger?]

[11/17/08] If the Greenland icecap melts, the Sahara expands and the Siberian permafrost disappears, don't blame carbon-emitting SUVs or billowing smokestacks, says a group of scientists who claim their research on global warming has been repressed. The explanation, they argue, might be simpler: Mother Nature is just going through her natural cycles.

Researchers from around the world have begun to question the growing acceptance among the public, the media and the scientific community that labels human behavior as the primary cause of global warming.

The researchers who go against the scientific grain on the climate change issue know their ideas are unpopular. In fact, many claim their research is so disliked the rest of the scientific community is working to suppress it in spite of convincing scientific evidence.

[2/17/07] Richard Brill states:

There is a nearly 1-to-1 correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature only for the past 450,000 years during the extremes of the ice age, but the correlation is much weaker for other stretches of geologic time.

Furthermore, carbon dioxide is not the only factor that correlates with climate change, and it is not the sole determinant of Earth's temperature.

[8/11/07 via brknews] Freeman Dyson says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.

[4/3/07] You probably remember the Doug Hornig/Brent Cook debate about global warming in these pages. Now the movie world has caught up to the discussion: a recent UK documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle (1 hr. 16 min.) presents evidence that counters the content of Al Gore's box office hit. Not CO2, but the sun, the researchers say, is responsible for global warming. Click here to watch.

[2/2/07] PARIS, Feb. 2 — In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate change scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

They said the world is already committed to centuries of warming, shifting weather patterns and rising seas, resulting from the buildup of gases in the atmosphere that trap heat. But the warming can be substantially blunted by prompt action, the panel of scientists said in a report released here today.

The report summarized the fourth assessment since 1990 by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, sizing up the causes and consequences of climate change. But it is the first in which the group asserts with near certainty — more than 90 percent confidence — that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming since 1950.

In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists and reviewers, put the confidence level at between 66 and 90 percent. Both reports are online at http://www.ipcc.ch.

Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling as a foregone conclusion sometime after midcentury unless there is a prompt and sustained shift away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered burning of coal and oil, the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an aggressive quest for expanded and improved nonpolluting energy options.

[2/2/07] PARIS - Scientists from 113 countries issued a landmark report Friday saying they have little doubt that recent global warming has been caused by man, and predicting that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level will “continue for centuries” no matter how much humans control their carbon emissions.

A top U.S. government scientist, Susan Solomon, said “there can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities.”

Environmental campaigners urged the United States and other industrial nations to significantly cut their emissions of greenhouse gases in response to the long-awaited report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“It is critical that we look at this report ... as a moment where the focus of attention will shift from whether climate change is linked to human activity, whether the science is sufficient, to what on earth are we going to do about it,” said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.

“The public should not sit back and say ‘There’s nothing we can do’,” Steiner said. “Anyone who would continue to risk inaction on the basis of the evidence presented here will one day in the history books be considered irresponsible.”

Pressure on world leaders
The scientists wrapped up the various chapters of the report Friday, and then released a 21-page executive summary for policymakers. The full report will be published in May.

The report represents the most authoritative science on global warming as the panel comprises hundreds of scientists and representatives. It only addresses how and why the planet is warming, not what to do about it. Another report by the panel later this year will address the most effective measures for slowing global warming.

One of the authors, Kevin Trenberth, said scientists are worried that world leaders will take the message in the wrong way and throw up their hands. Instead, world leaders should to reduce emissions and adapt to a warmer world with wilder weather, he said.

“This is just not something you can stop. We’re just going to have to live with it,” said Trenberth, the director of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “We’re creating a different planet. If you were to come up back in 100 years time, we’ll have a different climate.”

The scientists said global warming was “very likely” caused by human activity, a phrase that translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that it is caused by man’s burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

It also said no matter how much civilization slows or reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and sea level rise will continue on for centuries.

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level,” the scientists said.

Hotter nights, killer heat waves
The report blamed man-made emissions of greenhouse gases for fewer cold days, hotter nights, killer heat waves, floods and heavy rains, devastating droughts, and an increase in hurricane and tropical storm strength — particularly in the Atlantic Ocean.

Sharon Hays, associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, welcomed the strong language of the report.

“It’s a significant report. It will be valuable to policy makers,” she told The Associated Press in an interview in Paris

* * *

[1/31/07] In response to Doug Hornig’s article, longtime friend Brent Cook, a seasoned geologist, has prepared comprehensive and well-thought-out arguments. We’d like to share them with you here, in the interest of fostering information not based on pseudo-science or exaggerated threats, but scientific data of merit.

[1/15/07] Al Gore and others, including most of the media, have been telling us there now exists a "consensus" viewpoint on man-made (anthropogenic) global warming (or AGW). For purposes of economy, let's call them the alarmist faction. Furthermore, we're told that the faction questioning the majority view--we'll call them the skeptics--consists of only a tiny handful of shills for the oil industry.

Not so. (My note: be ready for a deluge of letters to the editor)

[7/16/06] Tom Brokaw reports on global warming on the Discovery Channel

[7/16/06] As we learned last year in New Orleans, weather can be a weapon of mass destruction. With the 2006 hurricane season now upon us, scientists say the climate is changing in ways that could produce many more superhurricanes, as well as extreme floods, droughts and heat waves that could threaten our way of life.

Still, it’s easy to ignore the signs of global warming because we’ve always had crazy weather. Unfortunately, many of the predicted changes have begun, and they already affect our health and pocketbooks. We ignore them at our peril.

[7/7/06] "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.

But when this does not happen — and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't — others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth" should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.

Intel's new generation chip

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors.

Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.

The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for cellphones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with less battery drain.

Doomsday Clock moves to 11:55

LONDON, England (AP) -- The world has nudged closer to a nuclear apocalypse and environmental disaster, a trans-Atlantic group of prominent scientists warned Wednesday, pushing the hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight.

It was the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward, this time from 11:53 to 11:55, amid fears over what the scientists are describing as "a second nuclear age" prompted largely by atomic standoffs with Iran and North Korea.

But the organization added that the "dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons."

Wave Hub: Hawaii

In Hawaii, where we are blessed with the second-best wave climate in the world, Wave Energy Converters could supply all the power needs of neighbor islands and 80 percent of Oahu's.

Educational Software

[1/19/09 via frwr-news] - MemoryLifter is a scientific memorization tool based upon the work of Ebbinghaus and Leitner. The FREE MemoryLifter software enables you to lift any kind of information into your Long Term Memory. Many clever, scientific and intelligent features speed up and enhance the memorization process to make your brain the strongest organ in your body.

[8/25/07] FMSLogo is a free implementation of a computing environment called Logo, which is an interactive programming language that is simple, powerful, and best of all fun. [via frwr-news, 8/18/07] (see also Kid's Programming Language)

[7/5/07] Question Writer - Personal Edition is software that lets you make your own multiple-choice quizzes. It's free for personal use, easy to use and even a beginner can create high quality quizzes. [from frwr-news, 2/10/07]

[4/18/07] Q & A is a freeware flashcard program that is simple to use, yet customizable in terms of font, color, and alignment. It includes helpful features such as an intuitive deck editing mode, deck shuffle option, and the ability to import and export decks so you can share decks that you have created with others. [from frwr-news, 4/16/07]

[12/27/06] Educational games from BlackRat Studios [frwr-news, 12/26/06]

chess: man vs. machine

[12/12/06] Although it received little mention in the popular press, Vladimir Kramnik, the world's reigning chess champion, was defeated last week 4-2 by the computer Deep Fritz, in a best-of-six-game match.

The defeat was not really that surprising. When Kramnik last met Deep Fritz four years ago, he battled the computer to a 4-4 tie. Since then, however, the computer has only gotten better. In fact, since 2002, Kramnik's "Elo" rating -- which measures the strength of a chess player -- has dropped, while Deep Fritz (an improvement from IBM's (NYSE: IBM) famous Deep Blue program) increased the number of positions it could calculate per second from 2.7 million to 8 million.

Thirty Pieces of Software

Battle of the Thirty

What follows is a list of thirty pieces of software that are the cream of the crop of open source software for Windows. Not only is every piece of it free, almost all of them directly replace expensive software packages.

1. Firefox
2. Thunderbird
3. Sunbird
4. Abiword
5. OpenOffice
6. ClamWin
7. Gaim
8. BitTorrent
9. GIMPShop
10. Gnucleus
11. VLC Media Player
12. Juice
13. Audacity
14. RSSOwl
15. Filezilla
16. Keynote
17. MusikCube
18. Handbrake
19. X-Chat 2
20. KeePass
21. TrueCrypt
22. PDFCreator
23. Freemind
24. NASA Worldwind
25. Notepad2
26. HealthMonitor
27. Workrave
28. GanttPV
29. GnuCash
30. True Combat: Elite

[via frwr-news]

Woz speaks

While many of us may now associate Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) more with an iPod than with an iMac, the Apple of old played a key role in developing a new type of computer --- a more, well, personal computer. The Fool's Mac Greer recently talked with the man behind that motherboard --- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the author of iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It, a book that he wrote with Gina Smith.

Web Space

[11/19/06] Google is offering web hosting via Google Page Creator. Saw this because Michael Zipf (see Anti-Virus programs) was using it to host his site.

jajah.com

We found another service for making free phone calls over the Internet; it's free to many countries and nearly free to the rest. It's Jajah.com, and using it is reminiscent of the old phone systems that used an operator to connect your call.

There's no software to download, and you don't need a high-speed Internet connection; dial-up will do. You just go to Jajah's Web site and type your phone number in a box on the screen. Then select the country you're calling and type in the phone number you want to reach. A few seconds later your phone will ring and you will hear a message telling you that Jajah is connecting your call.

-- Bob & Joy Schwabach, On Computers

Look ma, no hands!

Teenage boys and computer games go hand-in-hand.

Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis.

The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.

-- via annleach06@TheGreatSecret

World of Science

Eric Weisstein's World of Science contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics.

This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric W. Weisstein with assistance from the internet community.

Eric Weisstein's World of Science is written and maintained by the author as a public service for scientific knowledge and education. Although it is often difficult to find explanations for technical subjects that are both clear and accessible, this web site bridges the gap by placing an interlinked framework of mathematical exposition and illustrative examples at the fingertips of every internet user. [via frwr-news, 9/21/06]

C++ and Java

Bruce Eckel has kindly provided his book "Thinking in C++, Second Edition" free of charge to on-line readers.

Bruce Eckel has provided us with another amazing work of his. "Thinking in Java", 2nd edition, and now the new 3rd edition beta.

[frwr-news, 9/26/06]

[6/4/08] Thinking in C++ is are also here. [frwr-news, 5/21/08]

But perhaps the best place would be from the author's company Mindview.

Free Games

[5/4/07] Game Speed Adjuster [via frwr_news 6/19/06]. I wonder if this'll work with the DOS War2?

[8/31/06] This Windows XP Freeware Game Guide mentions some of the same games below. (So that tells me that they're probably pretty decent.)

[8/30/06] Some commercial-quality games are now available for free downloads including: Abuse (2-D scroller), Grand Theft Auto, Marathon Trilogy (precursor of Halo), Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Star Control II.

[6/3/06] C-evo is a freeware empire building game for Windows.
With a time scope of several thousand years, it covers aspects of exploration and expansion, industry and agriculture, warfare and diplomacy, science and administration. The game is based on Microprose's famous Sid Meier's Civilization and has many basic ideas in common with it. Actually, this project has arised from the wish to correct annoying design mistakes and AI weaknesses of Civ II. The priorities of the C-evo project are considerably different from big commercial games. While those are focused on easy entertainment and mainly compete for the most realistic and exciting up-to-date multimedia, this one aims at ageless challenge. [frwr-news]

[11/26/05] Most of us have whiled away some spare time playing the cheap and cheerful games that come with Windows, while others invest a little more time and money in the latest 3D games. This is an expensive luxury for lots of people, but the good news is that there are plenty of fun games to be had for free. [frwr-news]

Pluto no longer a planet

PLUTO was stripped of its status as a planet when scientists from around the world redefined it as a "dwarf planet", leaving just eight classical planets in the solar system.

Discovered in 1930, Pluto has traditionally been considered the ninth planet, and farthest from the sun, in the solar system.

However, the first definition of a planet approved after a heated debate among some 2500 scientists and astronomers drew a clear distinction between Pluto and the other eight planets.

The need to define what it takes to be a planet stems from technological advances that enable astronomers to look further into space and to measure more precisely the size of celestial bodies in our solar system.

In addition to the categories of “planet” and “dwarf planet”, the definition creates a third category to encompass all other objects, except satellites, to be known as small solar system bodies.

“The eight planets are Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,” said the IAU resolution, passed in a raised-hands vote after what, by the discreet standards of the astronomical community, was a stormy debate.

fight viruses & spyware

[3/6/13] The best antivirus for 2013.  Neil Rubenking the antivirus/security products for 2013.  AVG took the honors for the best free antivirus (over avast!).  Comodo Cleaning Essentials was the top free cleanup-only antivirus (over malwarebytes, though malwarebytes was the top if you read the review).

[5/11/12] Way back in the day ZoneAlarm set the computer security world alight with a cool, very powerful personal firewall product which defined the world of Windows PC safety for years.

Then the company seemed to lose its way, the technology started to wilt, and their products disappeared from popular use as other products took over. Well they're back.

ZoneAlarm Free AntiVirus + Firewall takes the original personal firewall product and tacks on an anti-virus pack, so you get a two-in-one lock down of your computer where it counts.

[7/16/11] Trying out Multi-AV. "The Multi-AV Scanning Tool is a software utility that provides multiple anti malware command line scanners to find or detect malware as well as remove it from your computer."

Hitman Pro is another one to use to double-check after you used your normal scanner(s).

[1/26/11] Top 10 Best Free Antivirus Software for 2011 (according to SofoTex)

[5/22/05] Free alternatives to Norton and McAfee.

AVG Free Edition

Panda ActiveScan (online scanner)

Trend Micro Housecall (online scanner)

One I'm trying out now is Avast

[8/21/05] AntiVir is another one. I think I tried this before, but decided not to use it. [4/25/10 - Avira has a pretty good review at download.com.]

[8/5/06] Cyberhawk's ActiveDefense technology hunts down and paralyzes threats that are too new or too clever to be recognized by traditional security software. [via frwr-news, 7/23/06]

[8/10/06] Active Virus Shield is free anti-virus for your PC that combines traditional antivirus programs, stopping them before they can infect your computer.
Active Virus Shield is brought to you as a free service of AOL and is based on Kaspersky Lab's award winning Personal Anti-Virus. [frwr-news]

[1/2/08] PC Tools AntiVirus Free Edition provides world-leading protection, with rapid database updates, IntelliGuard™ real-time protection and comprehensive system scanning to ensure your system remains safe and virus free. PC Tools products are trusted and used by millions of people everyday to protect their home and business computers against online threats. [via frwr-news]

[7/12/08] Kapersky removal tools [frwr-news, 2008-06-29]

[8/31/08] a couple more: Rising AntiVirus, Moon Secure AV [via frwr-news]

[10/20/09] new, free Microsoft Security Essentials [via twitter.com/cyberlifepc]

For spyware:

Lavasoft Ad-Aware

Spybot Search & Destroy

[7/4/05] Yahoo! Anti-Spy, which comes with the Yahoo! Toolbar, looks like it has promise. Its partner is PestPatrol and, I suspect, is using PestPatrol technology

[7/4/05] According to the Adware Report (found as a google sponsored link), the best spyware product currently is Aluria Software's Spyware Eliminator

[8/21/05] Spyware Tools

[9/28/05] This guy uses multiple layers of security on his computer (see Reader Feedback)

[12/11/05] From frwr-news, I tried out the EMCO Malware Destroyer. It seemed to catch a lot of junk, though there were two items (NMC.WSN and NMC.WHENU.WEATHERCAST) it found but didn't removee.

[12/20/05] Oh yeah, Microsoft AntiSpyware seems to be OK too, though it's still in beta (for WinXP).

[2/27/06] SpyCatcher

[6/3/06] superantispyware might find spyware that others miss, but it's reportedly slow [frwr-news]

[6/13/06] SpyDefense [from frwr-news / haven't tried it out yet, for Windows XP and the like]

Firewalls:

ZoneAlarm

Sygate

[1/19/06] More firewalls

[8/15/05] more scanners

* * *

[5/26/06] Here's a handy place to download free anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewalls

[11/13/06] GeeksToGo mentions many of the products mentioned above

[11/19/06] Michael Zipf's list

[5/25/08] filehippo lists many of the popular anti-virus and spyware programs

The Expert Mind

A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."

He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.