Saturday, June 30, 2007

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Last weekend “the one who must be obeyed” was working so I took myself off on a a short road trip to Mt. Rainier. Been there. Done that. But always fun and I never tire of the scenery. I went down the east side of the mountain and stopped in at Sunrise. At 6,400 feet, it was brutally cold with clouds right down to the visitors’ center. Pretty cool, but I didn’t stay long.

My intent was to pick up 123 where it junctions with 410 and go up to Paradise on the southwest shoulder of the mountain. “Ah, but 123 is closed,” you say, and you would be right. My forgetfulness required a 90 mile detour almost to Yakima before returning via Packwood to the entrance of the park at Ashford. I spent the night at the Gateway Inn, Cabins (and Hamburger Hut).

Next day I spent the morning cruising around the various roads and scenic points. The new visitor center is perhaps half completed. The Inn is being rennovated and except for construction eyesores, the scenery is terrific. The final picture, below, is of the Nisqually River, looking back toward Rainier. The glacier used to come all the way down here a hundred years ago. It had receded by around 1950.

All in all, it was a great little weekend side trip.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Motorcycles
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

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I have never wanted to make history. Making history is messy. And I like my world neat.

Making history is about struggle, triumph, overcoming great adversity. In short, history is messy because of the mud, the blood, and the gore. And I’m not talking about the physical. It is intellectually messy. Those who make history via intellectual achievement are often un-balanced people. Often their achievement requires a focus and dedication that leads to madness.

I like my history safe, sane, and beautiful. That’s why I like Colonial Williamsburg.

It is one of the oldest new-world settlements in North America. The company “Colonial Williamsburg” is working to make this part of American history beautiful. Let me explain.

In your town, there are new buildings that are perfect, old buildings needing major repair, and everything in between. Imagine a time, say 300 years from now, when every building was brought to “like-new” condition. Your restored town would be authentic because every building would be authentic. But it would be better than any real moment in your town’s history because everything would be like new; not a mix of the old, the young and the in between.

Now you’ve got the idea of Colonial Williamsburg. Recommended!

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Casual Travel
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Sunday, June 17, 2007

When I was in grade school in the 50’s ... that’s the 1950’s for you Y2K whiners ... the number to beat was a Million. We could not imagine living for a million hours. We could imagine living on the interest on a million dollars. We lived in fear of megaton yielding nuclear bombs. Commercially viable computers had barely been invented, but the first diskettes held less than a million bytes. The term “megabyte” hadn’t been invented, yet. Fast forward ...

When I started working in the mid-70’s a Million still loomed large in my psyche. I once programed a giant mainframe computer to print a million digits on 30 some sheets of microfiche, just so I could hold a million of something in my hand. Ever the uber-geek, I would carry the microfiche around and show people I could hold a “Mega-digit” in my hand. Cool! Fast forward ...

I’m not here to tell you a million is mega-passe. Our PCs have thousand megabyte (1 gigabyte) memories, store 100 gigabytes on their disks.

In fact, a billion is giga-passe.

The new number to beat is a million million (a.k.a. thousand billion, a.k.a. trillion) and we’re in Tera country now 12 zeros after the first significant digit. I often ask people who would be smarter if they didn’t know they were smart, “What is the speed of light in furlongs/fortnight?” Turns out the answer is a little more than 1.8 terafurlongs/fortnight. Really fast forward ...

In the March issue of Wired magazine, there was a piece focusing on tera numbers ... terabyte, teradollar, terawatt, and teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second - measures the speed of a computer). If you’re a numbers person, you’ll like this. How many teradollars is the Iraq war costing the US? How many hours of Internet porn can be stored in a terabyte? How many years would a terawatt power the electricity needs of New York City? How many pocket calculators equal 1 teraflop? How many Xbox 360s? Enquiring minds want to know.

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And check out Wired Magazine

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Technology
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Friday, June 15, 2007

I recently received an email from my congressman asking what I felt was our top national priority. Here’s my response:

I believe that investing in alternative energy sources is incredibly important. Since the 80’s the world has found less oil and gas energy reserves each year than we consume each year. With demand for carbon-based fuels (oil) beginning to increase dramatically in China and India, worldwide demand will certainly far exceed supply driving the prices to genuinely hurtful levels (not $4.00 per gallon but $40.00 or more). We can already see China and India beginning to act politically to secure greater and greater supply. I believe that unless we find, distribute, and use alternatives to carbon-based-mobile-fuels, we will fight a world war with China before the middle of the century … probably within our lifetime.

Since bio-fuels made from corn or other food crops produce barely more energy than that required to produce them, I do not believe they are the answer. Plus, they have the downside of diverting food from areas of the world that are desperate for food. This widens the spread between well fed nations and starving ones. If bio-fuels really take off, desperately poor and starving countries will become worse off and may resort to a greater degree of political terrorism. Who can blame them? They have no other weapons and few options.

So what’s the answer? 1) Renewable energy, especially solar, wind and tidal energy; 2) Nuclear (mostly as a 50 year stop gap) – but re-engineered to be safer, and with a re-engineered waste disposal cycle; 3) Hydrogen as the mobile-fuel of the future, using hydrogen-suspension technology which would let us use today’s petroleum distribution infrastructure rather than building a new hydrogen distribution infrastructure; and 4) Relentless, aggressive conservation measures including a) legislatively mandated gas mileage increases, b) legislatively mandated penalties for equipment that consumes energy in passive (or stand-by) mode (e.g. the clock on your microwave oven consumes more energy than that used to cook food) c) aggressive building code standards to reduce residential and commercial energy consumption.

People are all fired up about Global Warming. The trouble with this is that it’s politically polarizing. Whether man is the culpret or not ... whether it matters that the world is warming or not ... WE MUST SOLVE THE ENERGY SUPPLY/DEMAND PROBLEM.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Politics
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Monday, June 11, 2007

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I’ve been out of the country for a few months and I’m just now digging out. While gone I had a chance to visit Malta. Why? Where’s Malta? And, did I see the Falcon? Why? Because it’s there, it’s beautiful, and it’s historically interesting. Where? Fly from Rome, across the middle of Sicily, and keep going ... you’ll run right into it. Oh, and if you get to Africa, you’ve gone too far.

Getting there was easy and cheap: Bus from Florence to Pisa; Ryan Air to Malta, cab or bus to the hotel. Total cost round trip was about $200 including 2 nights in a hotel. Add in food and it brought the total to about $300.

So this professor friend of mine, we’ll call him Dan, well ...  because that’s his name, is a professor of creative writing and especially poetry. Although I like a lot of his poetry very much, I often tease him about his not writing poetry that rhymes. All this is doubly interesting because we got to composing limericks while we were there. Malta turns out to be hard to rhyme. “There once was a girl from Malta,” and Dan’s next line included the word “butt” and ended with “Asphalta.” It could be Malta is as difficult to rhyme as Albania (Check out the movie Wag the Dog!.) So I took my turn ...

Admittedly that makes no sense, but it rhymes! One limerick lead to another and we laughed ourselves silly. Good food, good company, and a couple of pints will do it every time. I hope you enjoy the photos and commentary. I like this place.

And check out www.DigitalQuixote.com for more photos and commentary, including the Aborted Drug Deal and the MURDER.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Casual Travel
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