Obscenely Huge Zoom Lens

Zeiss custom monster zoom: 1700mm focal length at f/4 with a coverage area designed for a Hasselblad 203FE 6x6 inch medium format camera. They don't specify whether or not the customer is also using one of the Hasselblad 39 megapixel digital backs on said camera (the older 22 megapixel backs retail for $25k, the cameras go for about $4-5k on the used market -- no FE-series lens included)...

Other useful stats: It's 5.5 feet long, and weighs over 560 pounds. Want one? Better win the lotto first...

Bicycle Helmets Make Car Drivers Care Less

Want to increase your odds of getting hit while riding your bike? According to this UK study, you should wear a helmet and ride on roads frequented by busses and delivery trucks. This combination should help ensure that you are given a minimal amount of space in which to ride safely. No wonder advocacy groups oppose adult helmet laws...

Odd Bikes or Cool Tech?

Judge for yourself:

• Shaft-drive/Chainless: http://www.dynamicbicycles.com/
• All Wheel Drive: http://www.christini.com/bikes.php
• Automatic Transmission: http://lrbikes.com/LR.asp
• CVT: http://www.fallbrooktech.com/NuVinci.asp (and PDF article)

The Universal Swiss Army Knife

With 85 different "blades", many of which are multi-function, it does EVERYTHING! (PopSci Story)

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it on the Wenger North America site, nor on the Swiss site. Not quite crazy enough to call the 800 number from the article, though...

The Twin Terrors

To help feed the mounting pile of FUD surrounding the "new danger" of liquid explosives, we have a sensational(ized) story to share:

This morning, the news wires were abuzz with reports of the evacuation of a small airport because "two bottles of liquid found in a woman's carry-on luggage twice tested positive for explosives residue..." The more responsible reports indicated that these positive tests were not really probative, and that several standard household items could fail these tests. Other sources, however, seized on the opportunity to invoke fear. Citing that the woman in question was a "28-year-old Pakistani woman in traditional Islamic dress" and had purchased a one-way fare, we were clearly all supposed to leap to the conclusion that she had been handed a tube of facial cleansing gel and a bottle of some other liquid (which, undoubtedly, was the necessary complementary reagent to said gel -- resulting in the formation of a deadly and devious binary compound of mass destruction) by the vast hoardes of Al-Qaeda operatives in the Tora Bora region. (I'm not completely convinced that the timing of the Seattle Port 18 cargo container bomb scare -- also citing Pakistani origins -- didn't influence these reports.) Apparently, both the TSA tests and a bomb-sniffing dog had both alerted upon the deadly Neutrogena-like substance (save us all if it happened to have those little exfoliating grains in it, I'm sure they make fantastic oxidizers). Later in the day, it was revealed that further investigation into each of these incidents resulted in the distinct lack of any actual explosives. Props to the Times of London for at least bothering to eventually get their facts right, so many of these stories go un-updated...

Quick! Somebody remind the popular media: Pakistan has "the bomb" (Say it with me, my fellow Americans: "new-cue-lur").

For other related readings: check out the gel bra ban and tales of inconsistent screening practices. (Or, just laugh along with this Register story, instead.) Time to buy stock in Colgate, P&G, Loreal, and other makers of fine toiletries and cosmetics. I figure if there are enough people like me who abhor checking luggage, then the worldwide demand for tiny toiletries is going to skyrocket. Mini-deodorant, mini-toothpaste, mini-cosmetics, and other mini-niceties and mini-necessities are going to be the rage! I'm considering submitting a patent tomorrow for a passenger airliner with enhanced onboard security apparatus; the embodiment: no overhead luggage compartments! While we're at it, we had better eliminate those switched overhead lights, and the "call steward/ess" button -- those could both provide potentially-lethal power sources, just like your wrist watch and cell phone batteries (especially considering their relative proximity to the emergency oxygen supply)...

The Gran Turismo 4 Virtual Prius Battery-Drain Challenge

Early this week, I was showing my vast collection of GT4 virtual cars to a friend. For some reason, I remembered that the Prius included a wild and wacky engine/battery flow diagram (3rd-party screenshot) that is based on the actual 2nd-generation car. At the time, I was lapping Tsukuba and we watched the batteries drain as I drove (using the standard controller), with its characteristic non-conservative near-digital accelerator modulation. That evening, there were better things to do than stare at a virtual battery guage -- but the seed was planted.

So, I repeated the experiment, but this time on the Circuit de Sarthe II (the old LeMans course, without the chicanes, for even more flat-out acceleration time, and a couple fewer brake/recharge zones). The results were indeed entertaining:

• First lap: thanks to a couple of brief off-track excursions, this lap took just over 6 minutes, and depleted about 75% of the battery.
• Second lap: the battery lasted long enough to get me up up to speed on the Mulsanne straight, just as the virtual charge management software swiched to "oh crap, I need to charge the battery some" mode. Because of improved familiarity with the track and the car, despite the diminished acceleration on the latter part of the course, I managed to shave nearly a second off of the fairly pathetic first lap.
• Third lap: the virtual charge management software refused to let the last bar from the battery go away; complete discharge is apparently not possible -- at least not in a GT4 virtual Prius. Because the battery was not being used to power the motor during hard acceleration, only the gasoline engine was available for almost this entire lap. By the time I hit the straightaway, I had already lost almost 15 seconds, and I finished the lap a full 45 seconds behind the second lap, despite improving my driving lines and braking timing yet again...

Based on this very spurious method of testing, one can only conclude that the combination of endurance racing and ridiculously agressive throttle modulation make for a fantastically bad mix in terms of the classic vehicular dynamics of a Prius.

Outlaw Trail 100km Route (TOPO!)

http://www.lonewolf-digital.com/maps/Outlaw_Trail.pdf

I may try to GPSbabel this into a Google Earth *.kml later this week. Watch this space.

Le Tour: dans trois dimensions courtoisie de Google

This is just plain cool, especially if you're an increasingly dedicated cyclist with a growing penchant for Geo-stuff... (I don't know anybody like that, personally.)

Ever wondered just how evil L'Alpe d'Huez really is? Well, Le Tour de France has a stage-by-stage KML file that you can download and examine in Google Earth. (Note: Macs and Linux boxen are no longer excuses for not having Google Earth.) This is a really good showcase for just what can be done, too -- they've incorporated all sorts of information, including the elevation profiles (with intermediate sprints and categorized climbs called out) and hyperlinks to some of the spots along the route. For lazy-heads, here's a shrunken screenshot of the route up L'Alpe d'Huez:


I suspect it won't be too long before we see real-time telemetry that allows you to follow your favorite riders along the course. Heck, there are probably quite a few folks that would pay for that...

Cool Device

http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/013/scupc1000.html#features

Looks like a useful contraption for bailing-out of various random computer-related problems, and a good way to recycle all of those old HDDs that are gathering dust.

Minnesota Trip: Picture Gallery

Select photos from this trip have been posted here.

Location: Duluth and the North Shore of Lake Superior, with a side trip to the International Wolf Center to avoid the rain.

I'll add a link for this gallery to my map soon.

What's Old is New Again...

I just put OpenBSD 3.9 on my old notebook, and am having fun running FVWM for the first time since about 1995 or so... This same system ran quasi-terribly with SuSE 9.x and kubuntu -- it just didn't have the horsepower to drive KDE. Turns out that without the overhead of a "modern desktop environment," (for the record Gnome sucked on it too -- via FC4 and ubuntu) the performance of my old P-III/850 is perfectly acceptable. My video and audio drivers are both fully supported, and my good-old PRISM3-based USB wi-fi adapter even looks like it will "just work" on non-WPA networks.

In other news, I added a Java SSH client to my site, so any browser with Java will now allow me to make my connections to various hosts throughout the galaxy. Public terminals are suddenly useful to me...

All Other Persons, Revisited

As the hype machine gears up in support of the proposed (un-)Constitutional Amendment to "protect marriage" in advance of the looming mid-term election, it is time to dust off and share my old satirical image. This illustration is in the same vein as my previous post from when Texas passed its amendment, but it may hit a little closer to the mark...

Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution based population and therefore representation on a number of factors, including a counting of free persons, and "three fifths of all other persons." Secton 2 of the fourteenth amendment changed this definition (although women still couldn't vote, nor could anyone under the age of 21, nor could -- in most jusisdictions, due to poll taxes -- the poor). Since a marriage contract is a legal document issued by a state or municipality, there is no reason for this issue to be addressed at the federal level. Period. The End.

So without further ado, the satirical illustration is here. The terms are the same as with the other illustration -- use it as you wish, but please host it on your own site if you choose to use it.

10,000 Things You May Not Care About

Found this list of "what's so special about this number?" when I stumbled upon stumbleupon.com.

For all you DaVinci Code conspiracy theorists, a brief list of forty "Fibbonacci index: value" pairs are displayed below:
1: 1, 2: 1, 3: 2, 4: 3, 5: 5,
6: 8, 7: 13, 8: 21, 9: 34, 10: 55,
11: 89, 12: 144, 13: 233, 14: 377, 15: 610,
16: 987, 17: 1597, 18: 2584, 19: 4181, 20: 6765,
21: 10946, 22: 17711, 23: 28657, 24: 46368, 25: 75025,
26: 121393, 27: 196418, 28: 317811, 29: 514229, 30: 832040
31: 1346269, 32: 2178309, 33: 3524578, 34: 5702887, 35: 9227465
36: 14930352, 37: 24157817, 38: 39088169, 39: 63245986, 40: 102334155

"Fun" Fibbonacci tidbits observed in these first forty iterations:

• number of instances where index=value [2: 1 and 5]
• number of instances where index^2=value [2: 1 and 12]
• order of magnitude indices [1, 7, 12, 17, 21, 26, 31, 36, 40, ...]
• indicies for which value/index is a whole number [1, 5, 12, 24, 25, 36, ...]

Fun with an Image Library

Getty Images brings you 10 ways to interact with images.

Monkey Love?

Today's widespread science news concerns a hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees not only share a common ancestor, but may have an overlapping history that involves a long period of "hybridization" prior to the evolutionary paths that lead to the current disparate species. The skeptical quote from the Harvard biological anthropologist, who is not associated with the study, is absolutely priceless:

"My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates — not to put it too crudely."

(Although priceless, the sentiment in the quote is not really informative. For example, when dealing with genetic precursors to both species, can bipedalism be assumed to be a valid trait? Is it safe to assume that one of the hypothesized sub-species had a more pronounced posterior than the other? He could just as easily tried to imagine that a "medicinal herb" was used as some sort of proto-date-rape drug -- not to put it too crudely...)

Also from the "Monkey Love" department is an older article about Harry Harlow and his experiments with Rhesus monkeys. These experiments demonstrated that touch and physical intimacy are more important to a developing infant that mere nourishment. I, for one, wonder how the subject of an ongoing attempt by an MIT Media Lab professor to catalog the development of speech in his infant son (by building a giant electronic archive of almost every waking moment of his pre-verbal life) would feel about this. And we wonder why the former chief of the Media Lab is off advocating wind-up laptops...

*: Yes, I know that chimps are properly apes, and not monkeys. However, "ape love" just doesn't sound funny, does it?

Poignant Lessons

The framers of the principles of governance that ruled the United States before "the world changed" (*) would be very disappointed in the way that the current citizenry accepts trespasses upon their rights in the name of security. When "No Such Agency" is listening in on certain phone calls and tracking almost all of them, what has occurred is nothing more than an erosion of the right of the people to speak freely. Recent examples show that your government has databases that expose who you're talking to, what you're searching for online, and what books you are borrowing from the library. You are expected, however, to entrust them to use this information responsibly -- despite the fact that they won't tell you how they are actaully using it. "Because I said so," may occasionally be a valid response from parent to child, but it is never a valid response from government to a free people.

In the modern age, the fundamental rights of association, belief, and assembly -- whether stated explicitly or rendered implicit in the first, fifth, and fourteenth amendments -- must be understood to embody our new forms of communication. If we choose to assemble or speak via the internet or the telephone, these technologies serve simply as an enabler of speech. When choosing to take advantage of the tools of modern society to express our opinions and beliefs, we should feel neither more opressed nor less free than if we chose to assemble in the presence of the monuments to Lincoln and Washington and to profess our dissatisfaction "the old fashioned way."

However, we must clearly understanding that expressing an opinion via these tools is at once trivially easy and profoundly impotent. Merely expressing a belief in no way should be seen to constitute taking action to uphold or defend that belief. This is one of the principal failings of the citizenry today; we are collectively willing to complain, but reticent to act. I urge you to follow the advice of the framers; take a stand against those policies of, and individuals in, your government that are failing to defend your rights, your freedoms, and your beliefs. Never be afraid to stand against your government, and always question acts of your government which serve to stand against your constitutionally-defined rights or freedoms.

Benjamin Franklin:
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Thomas Jefferson:
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
"Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand."
"Lethargy [is] the forerunner of death to the public liberty."
"No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority."
"[The] liberty of speaking and writing... guards our other liberties."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"Were we to give up half our territory rather than engage in a just war to preserve it, we should not keep the other half long." [Note: Substitute "liberty" for "territory," and the sentiment remains the same...]


(*): The world didn't change on September 11, 2001. The world has always been a place where the irrational actions of the few can have a dramatic impact on the many; a place where misguided beliefs lead to conflict, strife, war, and death. History clearly demonstrates that as a species, we are somehow unable to "just get along." Too many individuals blind their rationality and follow leaders that act in ways that are detrimental to mankind. Human history is filled with such leaders, who have emerged from all sources of human power and influence, including: military, political, religious, industrial, and financial.

RFID Ignition For Thieves

Turns out that most of the keyless ignition systems (often found in high-dollar cars, such as Mercedes-Benz [Keyless Go] and Lexus [SmartAccess]) use a really basic 40-bit encryption key(*). This means they can generally be hacked in minutes or less by a modern laptop and a motivated individual with an RFID reader. A little bit of knowledge of a car's particular system, and the ability to come into close-enough proximity with the "key fob" without being detected, can make the hack even easier. So -- do you trust Mercedes' statement in the Edmunds article that "It's nearly impossible to unlock the steering column or start the engine without the owner's remote unit," or do you believe that it's a little too easy to clone said remote unit...

*: A 40-bit key is equivalent to the original WEP standard for Wi-Fi, and we have countless examples of how lazy implementation of code rolling made that easily hackable...

Random Things

Neon Genesis: Evangelion article -- links to brief episode synopses, too

The FreeSound Project -- a Creative Commons library with plenty of noise(s), and some signal

An Aussie tax break the "W" regime would not approve of -- hint: business expenses for "oldest profession"

Florida high schools to require "majors" -- makes me glad I graduated so long ago

Word of the [Arbitrary Time Period]

"catholicon"
(derivation: Greek, καθολικόν - "katholikon")
[see also: catholic(2) and it's treatment of the Greek καθολικός - "katholikos"]

Traffic Suck? It's Your Fault!

Live Science's Mystery Monday column gives a cursory explanation of why your greedy attitude and sloth-like reflexes are the root cause of traffic jams. The same site also has an article that cites research which demonstrates that high speed limits don't hike the death toll.

If cruising highways is too "blasé" for you, then turn to PopSci. They can show you how to play pedestrian pinball with your Jaguar (arguably, this technology would take the fun out of Carmageddon), or can get you in a Star Trek mood with their Warp Drive overview.

Hmmm, I seem to have combined a Star Trek reference, a reference to a virtual automotive anger outlet, and talk about traffic into the same post. Somewhere deep in the subconscious, this must mean that I'm still baffled by my two pet-peeves of long-distance driving, which I have named Klingons and L.L.P.'s.

• In this context, a Klingon is defined as a driver who has absolutely no idea how fast they want to go. As they approach from behind at great speed, Klingons will latch onto the rear bumper of any vehicle and remain there until either A.) another vehicle passes at a higher velocity (and is latched onto) or B.) the driver of the latched-onto vehicle confuses the Klingon into acquiring a new target. Anecdotally, it would appear that Klingons are genetically predisposed to automotive myopia; they are uncapable of focusing on any object more distant than the nearest bumper. Further research may be required, but I would advocate mandatory installation of "corrective" windshields which (when activated at highway speeds) make objects appear much closer than they are.
  
• An L.L.P. is a left-lane parker. These pathetic creatures feel entitled to cruise at whatever darn speed they desire -- in the left lane. If they were consistently among the fastest travellers on the road, that would be one thing. L.L.P.'s have been routinely observed to ignore signs that clearly state "left lane for passing only," and generally move slower than the previaling flow of traffic, while simultaneously tending to position their vehicle in the most disruptive of possible physical locations with respect to the flow of surrounding traffic. Often, the L.L.P. is suffering from an acute and chronic case of rectal-cranial proximity dysfunction (RCPD). One notable sign of RCPD is constantly variable velocity that can appear chaotic and non-linear from a reference frame outside of their vehicle. (This, and other symptoms -- you'll know them when you see them -- are greatly exacerbated by the presence of a cell phone). The cure for L.L.P.'s is more complicated. First, they should have a protective Faraday cage installed in their vehicle (eliminating the utility of the cell phone). If this is not an adequate cure, then some more radical intervention may be required...