Marshall Brain's Blog

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Scientist Sees Space Elevator in 15 Years

From the article:

Edwards thinks an initial version could be operating in 15 years, a year earlier than Bush's 2020 timetable for a return to the moon. He pegs the cost at $10 billion, a pittance compared with other space endeavors.

"It's not new physics — nothing new has to be discovered, nothing new has to be invented from scratch," he says. "If there are delays in budget or delays in whatever, it could stretch, but 15 years is a realistic estimate for when we could have one up."

Edwards is not just some guy with an idea. He's head of the space elevator project at the Institute for Scientific Research in Fairmont, W.Va. NASA (news - web sites) already has given it more than $500,000 to study the idea, and Congress has earmarked $2.5 million more.

This sounds optimistic -- both the 15 year part and the $10 billion part. But let's say that he is right on both counts. If you can build one elevator, then you can build many of them. Let's assume that one of the elevators is used strictly for space tourism, with 30 people per day being carried into space. That's roughly 10,000 people per year. Over the course of 10 years, that's 100,000 people. $10 billion divided across 100,000 people is $100,000 per person -- quite a bit less than the $20 million per person being charged today. It would certainly change a lot of things...

Spam arrives every day and it is full of bogus claims. Most people understand that. But what about all the bogus claims being released through the major media?

For example, if you are a parent you can not help seeing ads for mosquito-repelling devices. Now we learn that one of the most heavily advertised ones is useless: FTC: No love for baby bug device

Health experts are now gearing up to fight all the false claims being made about low-carb foods and diets: Experts slam low-carb trend as rip-off

I noted earlier that a popular diet pill called Cortislim is useless, yet it is being promoted by a multi-million dollar ad campaign.

Polical ads are famous for their lies and distortions.

We are getting to the point where we need a watchdog agency that screens all ads before they are released to the public.

So what if there is an independent agency, similar to the Underwriters Laboratory. You've seen the "UL Label" on just about every electrical product you buy. The label certifies that the UL has tested the device, and it is not likely to cause an electrical fire. What if there was something like the UL label on ads -- a little logo in the bottom right corner -- saying that an independent agency has looked-at/listened-to the ad and certified it to be accurate? You would know that ads without the logo are bogus.

This article indicates that Harvard University could cut its tuition by $5,000 per year simply by cutting the executive salaries in one department to a reasonable level. It is fascinating to see how big an effect these huge executive salaries are having on the economy. Read more...

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The Salt Lake Tribune -- Teen smoking rate dives to generational low

From the article:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that nearly 22 percent of high school students said they were smokers in 2003. That is down from more than 36 percent in 1997, and the lowest level since the CDC began keeping track in 1975.

The drop was so dramatic that for the first time in more than two decades, the percentage of high school smokers is lower than the percentage of adult smokers. That was seen as an especially encouraging sign by the government.

The CDC study found that anti-tobacco efforts have been successful across the board, from curbing the number of first-time smokers to reducing the ranks of the heaviest smokers.

If you have kids, this blurb from The Week is pretty interesting/scary:

If your child is hyperactive, try removing artificial colors and preservatives from his diet. Researchers at Britain's University of Southampton found that additives made 3-year-olds more hyperactive, regardless of whether they had been diagnosed with hyperactivity. They studied 277 children on the Isle of Wight, half of whom had been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. For one week, each child drank juice spiked with food colorings and sodium benzoate, a common food preservative. Later, they spent a week drinking identical-tasting juice with no additives. Parents, who were not told which kind of juice their children were given, were asked to observe their children's behavior. Most rated their children significantly more hyperactive when the chemicals were in their diets and less hyperactive when the kids weren't consuming additives. The effect was so strong, researchers say in the Archives of Diseases in Childhood, that chemicals should be removed from the diets of preschool children "in the long-term interest of public health."

A nice, simple article describing pros and cons between plasma and LCD screens:

Flat-Panel TVs: Time to Go Skinny?

For example:

Plasma screens initially seem to be the better deal because they offer the best bang for the buck on the showroom floor. Today, $3000 will get you either a 30-inch LCD or a much larger 42-inch plasma TV. But a number of issues with plasma technology make the screens a poor fit for consumers, warns Jon Peddie, principal of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, California.

"They look great when they're new. It's a fantastic experience when you see one," Peddie says. But he warns: "The screen is hot, expensive, and noisy. It burns in; it wears out. For all those reasons, I don't think plasma is an appropriate solution for the home."

The difference between the two technologies is in the way LCD and plasma displays work. LCD screens employ millions of individual crystals, each of which responds to an electric charge to allow a specific amount and color of light to pass through the glass. Plasma screens use millions of tiny glass bubbles filled with a gas-like substance called plasma. When exposed to an electric charge, the plasma emits ultraviolet rays that cause the coating on the glass to glow the appropriate color. The problem is, the coating wears out over time.

That issue hit home for Enderle when he received a 30-inch LCD TV from Gateway to evaluate. Enderle had been quite happy with his three-year-old plasma TV--until he looked at it next to the LCD model.

"That's what really showed me how badly the plasma had degraded," Enderle recalls. "The LCD looked so much better. The funny thing is, the plasma degrades slowly over time so you don't even notice it."

LCD screens are immune to screen burn in and fade, which means they offer a significantly longer useful life than their plasma counterparts. In fact, the buttons and other components on LCD TVs are likely to fail before the screen itself does. Another advantage: LCD panels consume about half the power and produce much less heat than plasma displays. That means LCD TVs don't have to incorporate noisy fans to move cool air through the unit--a real problem with many plasma displays.

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Scientists find rodent monogamy gene

From the article:

What would you give for a simple injection that would stop your lover from cheating?

Well, at least it works for meadow voles.

A single gene inserted into the brain can change promiscuous male rodents into faithful, monogamous partners, scientists said Wednesday.

What we need next is a gene that disables nagging. Then everyone would be happy.

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First 'worm' aimed at mobile phones detected

From the article:

The malicious code, dubbed "cabir", is a worm that replicates on the Symbian operating system used in several brands of mobile phones, such as Nokia, Siemens and Panasonic.

The worm was anonymously sent to experts in various countries, but has not been detected circulating among cellphone users. It propagates through the "Bluetooth" wireless technology, repeatedly sending itself to any Bluetooth-enabled device that it can find, regardless of the type. The worm will not damage a phone or its software but shortens the device's battery life by constantly scanning for other Bluetooth-enabled devices.

Previous posts prompted two common questions from readers. This post on Reagan's funeral caused several people to ask, "Didn't pharoahs in Egypt have more expensive funerals than Reagan?" and this post caused several people to ask, "Are you sure that every phone call is not already being recorded?"

• Let's look at phone call recording first. Phone companies may already be recording every call... but my gut tells me it is still too expensive. If you assume that there are 200 million people in the U.S. using telephones, and they spend 20 minutes on the phone per day, and you assume a 4K byte/second encoding of their voices, then it would take about a petabyte (1,000 terabytes) per day to record their calls. It is still a major pain to create a petabyte drive array using today's technology. Creating a new petabyte drive array every day to record all the phone calls would, I think, be a bit much right now.
  
  I can remember in 1988 or so I had a friend who worked on a project that needed a 4 terabyte disk array. Standard "big" hard disks at that time were about a gigabyte. So he was going to use 4,000 drives. But the failure rate on the drives meant that several drives would be burning out per day. He was therefore having to arrange the drives into arrays (something like 32 drives in an array, with 4 drives per 32 for ECC, or something along those lines -- today you would do it with 8 drives in a RAID array and an extra parity drive), and then those 32 GB arrays were arranged into groups of 32, with 4 ECC arrays... And so on. It was nuts -- the amount of work you had to do to create a 4 terabyte array made that project nearly impossible in 1988.
  
  Now here we are 16 years later, and a 4 terabyte drive array is very easy. You can buy a dozen or so 300 GB drives, put them in a RAID array, and for $5,000 or so you are done. If you wait 5 or 10 more years, you will be able to buy a single drive that holds 4 terabytes for $300.
  
  I think if we wait 10 or 20 years, we will have petabyte hard disks (or some new solid-state form of mass-storage technology), and the technology will be cheap enough to allow phone companies to record every single phone call like they do with text messages today.
  
  
• On Reagan's funeral costs... The question is, "How much did it cost to build something like The Great Pyramid in Egypt?" I've seen a number of estimates indicating that it would have taken 5,000 men 20 years to build the Great Pyramid. Some say they were slaves, some think they were peasants paid in food... For our purposes let's assume they were paid the U.S. minimum wage. That works out to roughly $10,000 per year per worker. Multiply $10,000 by 5,000 men by 20 years, and it is $1 billion.
  
  If that is true, then Reagan's funeral cost as much as a pharoah's. But look what a pharoah got for his money -- The Great Pyramid! It's still one of the largest manmade structures on the planet and it has lasted 6,000 years! For the $1 billion we spent on Reagan's funeral, we got nothing.

Perhaps we should have built Ronald Reagan a gigantic concrete pyramid outside of Los Angeles or something...

Waves of Mourners Honor Reagan in D.C.

It's probably impolite to ask this, but it is an interesting question nonetheless: What will be the total cost of Reagan's funeral?

First, there's the cost of flying the coffin around. According to this article, Air Force One costs $56,800-per-hour to operate. Figure it's operating 20 hours to fly the coffin around and that's over a million bucks there.

Then there is the federal holiday that President Bush declared. According to this article:

President Bush has declared this coming Friday a federal holiday, to honor the memory of Ronald Reagan. All federal employees not involved with national security, defense, or other "essential public business" will get the day off.

To make the math easy, let's assume that it's two million people affected by this decree, and they make an average of $200 per day. Both of those numbers are low (the U.S. post office alone has over 800,000 employees), but that totals $400 million.

Then, because today was declared a national day of mourning, Wall street followed Washington's lead, so the markets are closed today. Heaven help you if you were planning a stock trading strategy around trading on June 11. Let's say this and its ripple effects are worth another $400 million.

Then there's the cost of the funeral itself...

And all of the extra security around the funeral and the viewings...

Plus the cost of all of the media coverage...

It's a lot of money. It will probably approach a billion dollars when it is all said and done.

Is it a world record?

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Just the title is scary: Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam

From the article:

Four-fifths of spam now emanates from computers contaminated with Trojan horse infections, according to a study by network management firm Sandvine out this week. Trojans and worms with backdoor components such as Migmaf and SoBig have turned infected Windows PCs into drones in vast networks of compromised zombie PCs.

Surely, at the ISP level, it must be possible to detect these computers and shut them down. It is hard to believe that this is going on in the year 2004...

I heard an ad on the radio today (and there is growing noise on the web) about the idea of cable TV channel choice. If you go to this page:

CWA - Cable Choice is Channel Choice

you can play the ads that are currently running and read more about the idea. See also this article from ConsumerReports.org.

The goal of this ad campaign is to pressure cable companies into giving consumers (us) the right to pick -- and pay for -- only the TV channels we want. So, instead of paying $40 per month and getting a "package" of 75 channels, we could pick, say, 10 specific channels and pay only for them.

What is interesting to me is this notion of "paying" anything for commercial TV channels. For example, if I want to receive the Discovery channel, why should I have to pay anything at all? The Discovery channel already has ads! What, we now have to put up with ads and pay cash -- whose idea is that??? I can understand paying for HBO because it is ad-free, but making people pay for the Discovery channel is nuts.

The way cable TV should work is that you pay $5 a month, or whatever, to cover the cost of bringing the cable feed into the house. Then you pay whatever the monthly fee is for HBO and any other ad-free channels you want. And then all the other channels (the ones like Discovery channel that are filled with 20 minutes of commercials for every hour of show) come in for free, because these channels make their money off of ads.

Then, in the ideal future 10 or 20 years down the line, we do away with the cable company altogether and replace it with a free wireless solution. For example, this article in the NY Times this week is interesting:

Where Entrepreneurs Go and the Internet Is Free

From the article:

At cafes, malls and downtown business districts, there has been an explosion of Internet access points, or Wi-Fi hot spots, that let computer users log on to the Internet for free. That growth is a fundamental reason - though not the only one - that technology start-ups, investors and industry analysts who had high hopes for Wi-Fi are scrambling to find sustainable business models.

Think about the economics of a hot spot. If you run a restaurant, and assuming that you don't already have Internet access, you go get a broadband cable line or broadband DSL line brought in. That might cost $100 per month, assuming you get a "business line". The wireless hub is essentially free ($50 to $100 one-time cost), and it takes five minutes to set it up. Now assume that 100 people a day come in and use your hot spot. It is only costing 3 cents per person to provide this service. The restaurant probably pays more than that to supply customers with napkins, and I've never seen a restaurant charge for napkins. So why charge for wireless Internet access? If we could get everyone to do this, and if we could get a slightly better protocol than 802.11 (bigger footprint, more speed, ability to overlap hotspots better and move between them), then wireless access would be ubiquitous and free for everyone.

This is why wireless communication will eventually be free. This article is already talking about 1 Gb/second cards for laptops. This post talks about all of the emerging wireless broadband solutions appearing today. Instead of paying a cable company for a channel like Discovery channel, in 10 years you will simply go to the Discovery Channel web site, pull the channel up in a browser for free, and send the data off to your 60-inch OLED screen so you can watch it. [One nice side effect -- there will be millions of TV channels in this world -- no more cable TV tyrany restricting the number of channels.] If politics and corporate power don't get in the way, then all the major phone companies, all the cable TV companies and all the cell phone companies will die a natural death in this free wireless world.

[Postscript - See also this article in today's NYT: "The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder."]

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There has to be some kind of nugget of truth in this story:

'Dying' couple blow £40k

Both spouses were diagnosed with "terminal" diseases. So, they decided to make a list of 50 things they really wanted to do before they died. According to the article: "Over 18 months they renewed their wedding vows on the QE2, partied in Rio, had a safari in South Africa and visited the Falklands, Senegal and Uruguay."

From the article:

But now Megan has been told her cancer is in remission, while Patrick, 66, is back at the gym after a successful heart bypass op.

And the couple, of Cheltenham, Gloucs, believe their “final fling” helped save their lives.

Perhaps the saying, "Live life as though you will die tommorrow" has some validity. Of course, if we all received a $25,000 per year stipend, it would be a lot easier fo us all to do this...

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Nowhere to hide: who really reads your e-mail?

From the article:

The people in my personal focus group (my wife, my mother, and some coworkers at CNET) agree that this is one of the creepiest things they've ever heard of: a new service that will tell your correspondents exactly when you opened the e-mail they sent you. It will also tell them how long you took to read their message and which computer you used to do so. The kicker: You'll never know all this information is being collected. It's a supercharged return receipt that's completely invisible.

The service is called DidTheyReadIt. What it does is insert a small tracking device, often called a Web bug, into the e-mail that you want to track. When your recipient opens your message, the bug (a one-pixel, transparent GIF file) is pulled from the DidTheyReadIt server, generating a logged event that shows when the message was opened and for how long.

This is the same technique used by spammers to detect if you open an email. Once they know you opened it, then they know that they have found a "real" email address and the floodgates open. Now everyone can take advantage of spamming technology.

What if you don't want people doing this to you? There is one way around it, maybe. Your email client would need to have a setting that says, "don't show me GIFs/JPEGs embedded in email messages". If every email program had that ability, then the problem would go away.

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Think before you text

From the article:

A few hours after NBA star Kobe Bryant had sex with a Vail-area hotel worker last summer, the woman exchanged cell phone text messages with a former boyfriend and someone else.

What's in those messages could help determine whether the sex was consensual or whether Bryant is guilty of rape as charged. The judge himself said the content may be "highly relevant" to the case.

That the judge could order the woman's cell phone company to produce the messages so long after they were sent shouldn't surprise anyone, analysts say.

Texters beware. Like e-mail and Internet instant messages, text messages tend to be saved on servers.

Your text messages are stored forever on a server somewhere, so watch what you say.

It makes you wonder how long it will be before every phone call made in this country is recorded and saved on a server somewhere for eternity.

There is something truly uncomfortable about this article:

Iraqis Paying 5 Cents a Gallon for Gas

From the article:

While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline - a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers.

American taxpayers pay $2 billion per year for this subsidy.

There are 100 million households, approximately, in the U.S. $2 billion per year means that your household, personally, is paying $20 per year so that Iraqis can get this benefit.

It will be interesting to see how they phase out this benefit. How, exactly, do you say to people suddenly, "OK, time to pay the real price -- $2 per gallon"?

Which brings up an interesting question -- What is the "real" price of gasoline? If you don't have speculators adding $10 a barrel to the price and oil companies gouging consumers as much as they can... That is, if all you pay is the real cost of pumping it out of the ground and refining it and trucking it to the gas station... Maybe the "real" price is only $1 a gallon.

This article talks about all sorts of techniques that interviewers use to get more information, and it is interesting because it can apply to lots of areas besides job interviews:

Interview twists, turns

For example, your date could try many of these to learn more about you...

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Web surfers look for porn, not searches

From the article:

Online porn sites get about three times more visits than the top Web search engines, including market leader Google Inc., a research firm said Thursday.

Web sites categorized as "adult" accounted for about 18.8 percent of all Internet visits by U.S. users in the week ending May 29.

Meanwhile, the category that contains search engines dominated by Yahoo, MSN and Google, accounted for about 5.5 percent, according to Hitwise Inc., a California-based company that tracks Web use.

During that time, Google garnered 2.7 percent of all Web visits while Yahoo Search and MSN Search received 1.7 percent and 1.1 percent respectively, Bill Tancer, vice president of research at Hitwise, told Reuters.

See also this post on porn.

Every year, digital cameras get better resolution. At the $1,000 level, you can currently get 8 megapixels (e.g. the Sony F828). Eight megapixels seems like overkill... until you read this article:

New high-resolution camera nears virtual reality

From the article:

"So he decided to make a camera that could create an image as awe-inspiring as the vista before him. The result was R1, a 110-pound, 6-foot film camera that produces what experts say are some of the highest-resolution landscape photographs ever made.

'Mountain I,' a 5-foot-by-10-foot color photograph captured by that camera, is on display at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York through July 30.

Ross, 51, wanted to share a near-replica of reality, without any of the blurring visible in most large prints. 'You can choose to go up to the picture and experience it intimately with a sense of unbroken reality,' he says.

Details of the mountain's snowcapped peak -- 7 miles from the camera -- are in sharp focus, as are individual blades of grass only 100 feet away. When sections of the image are magnified nearly four times, other details are clearly visible: the shingles on a barn 4,000 feet from the camera, a red bird in the grass 150 feet away."

The article does not actually say what the resolution of the camera is, but it gives some hints. Using those hints, I would guess that this camera has something approaching one gigapixel resolution.

Unfortunately the current technology needed to reach gigapixel levels is insane. It requires huge pieces of film, vacuum pumps and big aluminum supports to keep everything aligned.

But if you think about Moore's law... We should be able to buy 16 megapixel cameras for $1,000 in two or three years. Then 32 megapixel cameras two or three years after that. Then 64 megapixel, 128 megapixel, 256 megapixel, 512 megapixel and finally 1 gigapixel cameras. According to that timeline, we will all have gigapixel cameras by 2025 or so. Each image will consume 2.6 gigabytes on the hard disk (assuming we haven't replaced hard disks with some something better by then). But 2.6 gigabyte images will be OK because a hard disk in 2025 will hold a petabyte (1,000 terabytes).

The same kind of thing is happening on the video side. Researchers have leapfrogged HDTV to create UHDV, with 16x better resolution than HDTV. See this article for details.

Most of us currently connect to the Internet in one of three ways:

• Normal dialup connection (40-50 kbits/second, $10 - $20 per month)
• Cable modem (1 to 2 mbits/second, $30 to $50 per month)
• DSL (1 to 2 mbits/second, $30 to $50 per month)

If you live in a fairly dense neighborhood and lots of people around you have wireless hubs in their homes, there is also a free option. You can use an 802.11 (WiFi) card and get Internet access from an unsuspecting neighbor.

Dialup, cable and DSL all require a wire. There is now a push to bring wireless Internet broadband connectivity directly to consumers. Here are three options that are emerging:

• Nextel Broadband - This service is already available in some areas. Nextel is using its cellular infrastructure to provide broadband access in homes and small businesses. The huge advantage is that you can take your laptop anywhere in the service area and get broadband speed. 1 mbit/second access costs $65/month. As more cell phone companies deploy 3G, offerings like this could become more common.
• WiMax (aka 802.16) - The technology is being tested, and once it is deployed in a real way should give 802.11 hotspots an easy and wireless way to connect to the Internet without resorting to a DSL or cable modem.
• Motorola Canopy - (click on "Canopy Demo" in the left sidebar for a nice explanation of how it works) - provides a wireless replacement for Internet connectivity. A company has to set up antennas and sell the service. The service area stretches up to 2 miles from an antenna.

For remote areas, there are also satellite broadband connections like Direcway.

It should be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next year or two.