Duane’s Quick Posts

I like this line in a recent letter from Ron Paul regarding the Rally for the Republic:

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Along with solar energy, one technology that has fascinated me recently is the various "air to water" condensers or Atmospheric Water Generators as they've been called.  The technology doesn't quite seem fully developed yet, but I imagine that if these start-ups have their way, nearly free water will be available at any location on earth, with just (somewhat humid) air and solar energy as ingredients.

The coolest technology award goes to the "dew catching pyramid", WatAir, which is basically a big water collector that looks like beautiful architecture and has no electric or moving parts.  Unfortunately, it seems the only photos are just mock-ups at this point, so I'm not even sure if it's a real-life object yet.

But for the more practically minded (which may or may not include myself), I've also checked out several "water station" type generators that would be a replacement for the traditional "office water dispenser" that seems to be in every suave office space.  The brands I've compared include:

* EcoloBlue (currently my favorite)

* AquaMaker

* AirWater

* WaterMaster

* TerraLab

* Wataire International

* AirToH2O

* Aqua Sciences

See this spreadsheet for a comparison of available data.  I wish there were more price points to compare from, but that's all I have to work with right now.

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This is one of the coolest things I've heard about, ever.  It isn't a technological fad that will be superseded in a year or two... it will last thousands of years.  It's called The Rosetta Project, and according to Kevin Kelly, it was just completed this week:

The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 500X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 15,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 2500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

     

Click here to download:

The_greatest_archeological_tre.zip (91 KB)

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I've heard this is a great documentary, and with it featuring Ron Paul and David Walker, I think it's worth seeing.  It will be showing tonight at the Provo South Towne Theatre (Cinemark 16), at 6 PM.  I'm without a car right now, but I'm going to see if I can make it anyway.

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Textmate is an awesome text editor for Mac OS X with one unfortunate weakness: the "Find in Project" feature.  Find in Project is slow, and what's worse, it can sometimes be so slow that it takes minutes to come back (meanwhile, Textmate is unresponsive and the system slows down).  I've actually waited for 15 minutes on one occasion, until I finally had to kill the application and start over.  I've lost data on 3 occasions that way.  It has also crashed when searching text files with extremely long lines.

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So this is my 7th year at BYU and I just now found out about a web page that tells which books you'll need for the semester. The book list becomes available August 26th, since (according to the BYU bookstore) professors change and reassign textbooks a lot until that point.  Also note that you have to be logged in to your RouteY account to access the page.

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I'm sorry, Mozy, I really wanted to keep you.  You tried to make things better, and I appreciated that.  But your backup system is just not ready for the Mac OS yet... if you make the following things work, I will very likely come back:

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