"Support" the Troops Wristbands

Those LiveStrong rubber wrist bands became all the rage last year thanks to Lance Armstrong. Now everyone is doing one with a small modification. Whereas the LiveStrong ones donate ALL of the proceeds to cancer, how much do the "Support The Troops" wristbands donate? It's a percentage. Well it's right around 0%. Actually it is 0%. 0 is a percentage! Raymond Chen does the math.

Photon - iPhoto / Blog integration

Daikini Software has a freeware plugin for iPhoto to allow you to export photos to your blog. It claims to work with Movable Type, Blojsom and Wordpress so I couldn't try it out with Blogger. They also have a plugin to post to Typepad that uses the ATOM API - It seems like this could also work for blogger (although free accounts on blogger don't have space for photos). Daikini also provide the ultra useful (i.e. working!) PHP ATOM API examples. Hopefully someday (soon!) all of the popular blog tools will support the ATOM API and you won't need different tools.

Paul Krugman on Social Security

"Fixing" Social Security is a hot topic these days. Economist Paul Krugman delves into whether it needs fixing in the first place for the New York Book review. Demographic shifts are a reality but I'm a lot more convinced when people talk about how different projections play out than try to scare you with regurgitated half-baked analysis to backstop their plan to drive the federal government several trillion dollars further in debt. The inability of the government to control spending (dramatically in the past few years) is actually at the heart of the problem:

It's likely that financial markets would be made very nervous by borrowing on that scale, with the prospect of repayment so far in the future. Bear in mind that the debt incurred during the four decades of increased deficits would be a real, legally binding promise to repay, while the claim that privatization would save money in the long run depends on the assumption that whoever is running America half a century from now will follow through on benefit cuts, even if private accounts have performed poorly and left many retirees in poverty. In the real world, the bond market would consider the solid fact of soaring debt a lot more significant than projections of savings through politically determined benefit cuts many decades in the future. In practice, privatization would significantly increase the risk that international investors will stop lending to the United States, provoking a fiscal crisis, sometime in the not too distant future. Even if we ignore the danger of provoking a fiscal crisis, the claim that borrowing to create private accounts will somehow benefit everyone is a remarkable exercise in free-lunch thinking. If nobody suffers any pain, where does the gain come from? If private accounts were invested in government bonds, as Mr. Bush suggested back in 2000, there would be no possible gain; the interest earned by private accounts would be completely offset by the interest paid on the government borrowing to fund these accounts. So the claim that there will be gains from privatization always comes down to this: part of the private accounts will be invested in stocks, and privatizers insist that stocks are more or less guaranteed to yield a much higher rate of return than the government bonds issued to pay for the creation of those accounts.

Einstein@Home

Why waste your (computers) time looking for Alien Life or searching for a cure for cancer when you could be doing something really important like looking for gravity waves! Einstein@Home is a distributed computing project to analyze data from the LIGO / GEO gravity wave interferometers. What's a gravity wave you say? Part of general relativity is that gravitational changes can propagate no faster than the speed of light, transmitted between two objects using a (theoretical) Graviton particle. Gravity waves are a consequence of this - if something very large (like a pulsar, a neutron star or a hypernovae) is rotating fast enough then it will generate a gravity wave - as the wave passes it causes the strength of gravity to change but not uniformly in all directions. The goal of a gravity wave interferometer is to measure the changes in gravity s the wave passes through the earth. An interferometer is a device that uses wave interferance to precisely detect wave motion - gravity waves in this case. In the case of LIGO, the interferometer is an L shaped device with a laser beam travelling down each arm, being reflected back and recombining together. If each arm of the L is exactly the same length then the light waves will add together. But if one of the arms of the interferometer is a little further away (because of a passing gravity wave changing the force of gravity along one of the arms) then the laser beams will interfere and start to cancel each other out. Because gravity waves interact very weakly with matter, you need a really big interferometer - the arms in the case of LIGO are 4 km (2.5 miles) long. Even over this distance, the arms of the interferometer should be distorted a very small amount - about 10-18meters (less than a hydrogen atom). As you might imagine, lots of things (earthquakes, Godzilla attacks, etc) can create a variation this small so LIGO actually has multiple interferometers within the United States and GEO is a similar device in Germany. This allows them to check candidate signals against the other interferometers which is where Einstein@Home comes in. Plus it looks cool which is why anybody runs any of these things!

Malcolm Gladwell talks about Blink

ITConversations (which has an RSS feed complete with enclosures if that's your thing) has another interview with Malcom Gladwell discussing the ideas in his new book Blink.

How to fix your car with a camera

For some reason, several of the bulbs in my car have decided to fail right after each other. I've never had to replace a car bulb before - this car has daytime running lights so the lights get significantly more use than if I just used them at night. The rear light bulbs are relatively easy to replace but the headlights are a real pain. If you look at the diagram it looks real easy. The reality is that there is barely enough space to get your hand in to pull the bulb out, let alone see what you are doing since various parts of the engine (caution: HOT!) are in the way. So I stuck my camera in there and took a picture so I would know what I was actually holding on to. It still wasn't easy but it gave me a fighting chance.

Know your Photographic rights

From Jeremy Zawodny's Linkblog is this flyer of legal rights for photographers - this is only applicable in the US, your mileage may vary. It's becoming increasingly common for people to try to restrict where photos may be taken. Stores now routinely prevent customers from using cell phones because they might be a cell phone (my wife ran into this at a popcorn store in Chicago) and both the New York MTA and San Francisco MUNI are trying to ban photography on the subway - usually due to vague security concerns. At the same time it's becoming increasingly common for people to have a camera with them all the time (cameraphones or small digital cameras) so when something does happen, you'll be more likely to have a camera. And blogs and Flickr have given the individual to publish their photos to a much larger audience. Given all this, it's much more crucial to know what you can and cannot photograph so that someone says "Don't take a photo of that!" you'll know whether they have the right to enforce it. From the flyer (please read the whole flyer):

Permissible Subjects Despite misconceptions to the contrary, the following subjects can almost always be photographed lawfully from public places:

• accident and fire scenes
• children
• celebrities
• bridges and other infrastructure
• residential and commercial buildings
• industrial facilities and public utilities
• transportation facilities (e.g., airports)
• Superfund sites
• criminal activities
• law enforcement officers

Who Is Likely to Violate Your Rights Most confrontations are started by security guards and employees of organizations who fear photography. The most common reason given is security but often such persons have no articulated reason. Security is rarely a legitimate reason for restricting photography.

Mission Peak, Fremont

On Sunday, my wife and I climbed Mission Peak in Fremont. This is probably the most interesting hike you can do of all of the local peaks. For one, it doesn't have a paved road going to the top (like Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo or Mount Hamilton), it gets some interesting weather and turns into mild scrambling over rocks towards the top. Did I mention the cows? Look out! In our case, we got up early and climbed through the clouds. It was pretty much cloudy right until the last 50 ft which gives the amazing view in the photos.