My imagination is that of an engineer with astronomy post-grad qualifications. What I see in the more typical image below is more akin to a caricature the classical illustration of a Dodo (Head to the right, feet to the bottom). In Steve’s image I see only exquisite detail including Bok Globules (top centre) and lanes of silhouetted dust.

Image credits:
S. Crouch, 2008. IC 2948, Running Chicken Nebula
M.Lorenzi and G.Favretto, 2003. IC2948 Complex

As a Firefox user I have the Greasemonkey add-on at my disposal. Greasemonkey can selectively modify web pages on-the-fly to do almost anything to the content like:

• Remove or hide parts of the page
• Add bits to the pages
• Insert code to periodically reload a page that normally wouldn’t.
• Convert URLs embedded as plain text to real hyperlinks (another good one for the forum)
• It can even incorporate parts of other pages or sites

What I ended up with is a Greasemonkey script that inserts a site-targeted Google search box into the forum’s tool bar. The result is shown below:

The inserted search box should fit comfortably on any screen of 1024 or more horizontal pixels. Search results are targeted to the ABC science forums and end up in the forum’s main frame to avoid taking the user away from the forum. As a bonus the search box also appears on the TechTalk tool bar.

If you are interested in trying it out then:

1. Ensure the latest version of Greasemonkey is installed.
2. Click this link to install my script.
3. Tell me how much you like it

As an IT literate guy I frequently find myself explaining to others how even the simplest IT things can be done more efficiently (or effectively) with small changes in behaviour or thinking. Often these things are as straight forward as, “You can copy and paste using Control-C and V” or “There are better tools than Excel for collecting this information.” Some people take these things and run with them, and others revert to type within minutes but this rarely leads to the sky falling in. This level of individual coaching, however, is not going to attract work at $100/hr.

Sometimes more complex offerings involve the other party rethinking how they approach what they are doing in order to facilitate the types of efficiency gains that Seth refers to. This poses quite an obstacle in large project/organisations. A common scenario is a project sub-team that is focussed on how the output of a process looks, e.g. a report in given format, and considers that the only way to do it is to collate information, in isolation from others, into that output format. This, IMHO, is rarely the most efficient way to do it even in the unlikely event that their outputs are independent of all others in related tasks. However, addressing any IT efficiencies in this process are almost always focussed, by the client, on ways of collating information in that output format and not on a more holistic approach to the problem(s). My experience of several large Defence and commercial projects is that the larger the project the greater this inertia of thinking becomes. Of course, large projects are often supported by IT teams that should be guiding the project’s computing directions: in practice I think they are often marginalized by the project management (outside of IT projects they’re running) or organisational issues. Complex environments also dictate a longer required (non-productive) period by the coach to assess the most effective changes; creating a financial barrier that feeds the thought inertia. Whether an external digital coach would have any effect in this environment is debatable.

I am sure that Seth’s notion of ‘digital coaches’ will work in some circles. It has a greatly improved chance of success in smaller settings where the coach is requested, respected, and has the ear of someone with the desire and capacity to enforce/ensure adoption of change. It seems to me essential that the coach can grasp the situation in a reasonably small time and start making productive suggestions: after all the customer does not want to be paying $100/hr for two weeks to see some result. Seth’s example of a restaurant or small business seems to be about right. Dave Saunders commented, “I love the idea of a digital coach. I sure wouldn’t want to do it though.” I agree: at least until I’ve tried it in a small business. I’ve already tried it in large organisations, and the best I could say is that it’s often demoralising and usually ineffective. Maybe that’s an indictment of my own abilities rather than the concept.

Needless to say, the image is not a simple happy snap of the planet and its moon. The NASA site carries a description of how the image was composed but it also carries quite a bit of jargon that I’ll try to decode here.
The camera responsible for the image, called LEISA, is sensitive to infrared light: the sort of light emitted by your TV remote. Light is characterised by its wavelength, with infrared light having a slightly longer wavelength than the nearby visible red light. The warmer an object is, the shorter the wavelength of the bulk of light it emits… if it is warm enough it glows visibly red, yellow, blue… think stars. While Jupiter’s atmosphere is not hot enough to emit much infrared light just because of its temperature it does reflect a lot of sunlight. Different gases reflect/absorb light at particular wavelengths and this can give away the atmospheric composition. By taking images in light of a range of wavelengths (1.59, 1.94, 1.85 micrometres) the camera is effectively taking images of gas of certain compositions, temperatures and, by inference, depths in the atmosphere. Using comparative information such as these images a great deal can be learnt about the object. The three images above show an approximate reproduction of the original images around the Great Red Spot (GRS). The imaging team shaded the images red, green, and blue and merged them to form the image of Jupiter.

The overlaid image of Io was constructed using a monochrome (black and white) optical photograph taken with the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera. Using images from another camera, sensitive to bluish light typical of methane, an artificial colouring has been applied. Once more Tvashtar is billowing, and lava is flowing on the surface.

You can experiment with splitting light with a spectroscope by following the links from my previous Science Projects in a Small World post. The LEISA camera is tuned to pick up light from one narrow section of a full spectrum, similar to targeting the prominent lines in the image to the left.

• The Wigglez of the Universe from the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
• Towards Absolute Zero on an Atom Chip from the Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy (CAOUS)

Go here for viewing pleasure.

On a slightly different tack is the creatively off-beat Make Magazine. Make publishes a traditional dead-tree magazine that rarely makes an appearance on Australian shelves (although I think McGills carry it) and a regular podcast program. Ever wanted to make your own Rubik’s cube out of dice, Jam Jar Jet! (PDFCast), or Teeny Tiny Solar Robots.

Enjoy.

The bookmark took the the form of Simon Quellan Field‘s business card (of Kinetic MicroScience) and pointed me to a site full of science experiments you can do with your kids. Simon also maintains a blog. I love little experiments, actually anything that enthuses kids about science, and this site serves it up in spades. There are experiments with magnetism, motors, DIY radio receivers, optics, biology among others. Older kids will no doubt get a buzz out of the film canister cannon (below). The construction of a spectroscope using a CD as the diffraction grating is near to my heart as an astronomer. Spectroscopy is a major part of astronomy because it allows determination of the temperature, composition, and physical size (to some degree) of stars at immense distances.

That a business card left by a science enthusiast in a book in California should make its way via a second hand book dealer to another science enthusiast in Australia drives home how connected the world is these days.

I recently decided to revisit a book I read five years back (Philip Ball, Designing the Molecular World, Chemistry at The Frontier, ISBN 0691029008) and set about trying to find a copy. My local library drew a blank so it looked as if I would have to buy. The obligatory search at Amazon turned up a lot of used copies that were much cheaper than the new version. The cheapest used book vendor with a copy in good condition was Better World Books (my book was AU$11 delivered). When I looked I found that Better World has a interesting take on business that appeals to my altruistic side.

Better World provide some of every sale to one of a range of literacy programmes like Room to Read, Books for Africa, Worldfund, and the National Center for Family Literacy. Better World also provide books directly to schools where they are needed. A commission goes back to the library that provided the used book for sale: source libraries save on the cost and effort of holding their own used book sales. A levy is placed on every order to cover the carbon emissions in processing and delivering the book: making the process carbon-neutral through CarbonFund.org. To cap it all off you can email Better World books and get a reply from a real person, the books are well priced (prices change dynamically with demand), and the international shipping is very cheap (US$2.97 vs. Amazon’s US$12).

Better World is somewhere to buy that actually has a social conscience. They support providing the joy, indeed the necessity, of books to those in need in the hope of making the world a slightly better place. So, the next time you want a book try Better World Books and feel better for it. Incidentally, I’d love to hear of an Australian equivalent.

One of the large figures in the free software world is Eben Moglen, a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University and heavily involved in defending and extending the GNU General Public License. In the video below Eben Moglen is speaking at a lecture for the Scottish Society for Computers and Law titled, “The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3.” The video is 80 minutes long (about 160MB) but Moglen manages to eloquently encapsulate why Free Software is important in the first 20 minutes. If you are in the slightest interested it is well worth the time.

The event is also available as streaming audio and a transcription.

I found this talk one of the most persuasive arguments for the freedom of software (and knowledge in general). In addressing the reproduction of knowledge in digital form Moglen notes that the incremental cost of further copies is approaching zero and follows:

The consequence of those changes is the onset of a very powerful moral question. If it is possible, easily possible, to give to each human being who wishes it, anything of utility or beauty in our world of civilisation, if it is possible to deliver any such entity anywhere at any time at low cost or at zero cost, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything she wants?

This argument really appeals to me.

References:

1. The video is sourced from The Internet Archive and is released under the Creative Commons: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 by Al Broom, Valley Technology.
2. The GNU image is by Aurelio A. Heckert, release under the Free Art License. From http://www.gnu.org/graphics/heckert_gnu.html

Many (most) motherboards have an ability to wake up at a certain time, but this must be manually set from the system setup pages. I initially tried the NVRAM Wakeup utility. This utility works by directly writing wakeup time and date information into non-volatile memory and is very tightly coupled to hardware and software revisions. My motherboard (an A7V880 BIOS rev 1008) was supported out of the box and it seemed to work. Unfortunately though, this motherboard has other issues that I needed to remedy with a BIOS update (to 1009.001). This meant that I had to go through a repetitive routine to have NVRAM Wakeup guess the memory locations of interest. I did get a working setup but I had to manually hack the automated guess, and even then there were elements of doubt. Every so often the machine would wake to corrupted NVRAM contents . While I am not certain that the wakeup routines were the cause I thought I’d migrate to a method that was marginally less risky.

The Linux kernel ACPI implementation exposes the BIOS alarm system as a file /proc/acpi/alarm. If you look at the content of this file is gives a human-readable representation of the currently set alarm time like 00-00-05 21:30:00. By writing to the file in the same format you can set the alarm time although usually the month and year are ignored, and 00 in the day field means any-day. The time must be written to the alarm file in whatever time zone the hardware clock is set (UTC on most Linux-only machines, but sometimes local time if the machine is shared with Windows). There is another way to write the time that avoids needing to know whether the hardware clock is UTC or not. Writing time in this format +00-00-01 02:45:00 will cause the kernel to add the specified days, hours, minutes, and seconds to whatever the current time is and store that in the alarm. I wrote the script linked below to do just that. It acts as a drop-in replacement for nvram-wakeup and accepts the same options and inputs (although it ignores most of them). The desired wakeup time is passed from MythTV as a UNIX time stamp: seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. Appropriate mathematics is done and a time delta is stored into the alarm file. The script is limited to times within 31 days, which should be adequate for most purposes. This script has been working well for the past month.

I believe there are two other gotchas that might be of interest:

• On some motherboards the alarm time is reset if the hardware clock time is updated during shutdown. This is usually in a script halt.sh (or the like). You can work around it with something like:
  BACKUP_TIME=$(cat /proc/acpi/alarm)
... the existing clock setting code (hwclock)
echo $BACKUP_TIME > /proc/acpi/alarm
  to restore the value after the clock is set.
• From kernel version 2.6.21 or 22 this support is likely to disappear and be replaced with less PC-centric clock handling. When this occurs I will be rewriting the script.

Now, if only I could perfect the commercial skipping feature

Clear skies!

Download ACPI Wakeup Script

The MythTV screen shots are from the very ornamental Blootube wide theme by Justin Hornsby.

You might recall the hubbub surrounding last year’s International Astronomical Union (IAU) decision to put a definition on the term planet. The fact that Eris was initially assessed as larger than Pluto (2390 km), and that there were likely to be many more objects like it, partly drove the need to define planet. Pluto, the last planet to be discovered, was relegated to the new category of dwarf planet to join the asteroid Ceres and Eris.

The ways that astronomers have found to gather information about things they cannot even hope to get close to never ceases to impress me.

Clear Skies!

See also:

[1] Brown, M. E.; Trujillo, C. A.; Rabinowitz, D. L. Discovery of a Planetary-sized Object in the Scattered Kuiper Belt. The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 635, Issue 1, pp. L97-L100. NASA ADS Entry

[2] Bertoldi, F.; Altenhoff, W.; Weiss, A.; Menten, K. M.; Thum, C. The trans-neptunian object UB313 is larger than Pluto. Nature, Volume 439, Issue 7076, pp. 563-564 (2006). NASA ADS Entry

[3] Brown, M. E.; Schaller, E. L.; Roe, H. G.; Rabinowitz, D. L.; Trujillo, C. A. Direct Measurement of the Size of 2003 UB313 from the Hubble Space Telescope. The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 643, Issue 1, pp. L61-L63. NASA ADS Entry

[4] Michael E. Brown and Emily L. Schaller. The Mass of Dwarf Planet Eris. Science, Vol. 316. no. 5831, p. 1585. Journal link