Thursday, December 30, 2004

: "Semantic disagreements cause the large majority of arguments and political issues" This is a cool site that explores the role of semantics, language, and the source of misunderstanding. I love the author's quote: “How can we agree on 'what is fair' until we can agree on 'what fair is'?”--Alexander Rohde

Guenter Albrecht-Buehler, PhD

Guenter Albrecht-Buehler, PhD: "Wireless optical networking between Mitochondria and and centrosomes" Maverick research reveals that the organelles inside cells may communicate with each other by emitting and detecting infrared light. This implies that optical connections are acting as the "nerve" pathways inside cells. If so, it creates the foundation for a revolution in biological computing technology.

Tsunami Adds to Belief in Animals' 'Sixth Sense'

Yahoo! News - Tsunami Adds to Belief in Animals' 'Sixth Sense' How is it possible that there are no dead animals in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami? Is there any current scientific hypothesis that can explain why animals are able to sense the onset of natural disasters? Growing up on a farm, I observed that the animals would anticipate bad thunderstorms, but I attributed that to changes in barometric pressure. Earthquakes are different.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Natural Gas, Oil Occur Naturally

Natural Gas, Oil Occur Naturally: "Another thing is that oil, consistently, the world over, contains a large concentration of the natural gas helium, which is totally chemically unconnected to biology. There is no biological material that could have attracted it or produced it. " Very interesting article related to my earlier post. A friend at an oil company pointed this site out to me. It's somewhat consistent with the earlier observation.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Uranium--source of oil?

I saw recently (I think in the San Jose Mercury News) that a "maverick" geologist is doing some experiemnts to determine if the core of the earth is made of uranium. Not being a geologist, this seems logical, as the heaviest things float to the bottom--everything below the crust of the earth is liquid, and the center of the earth is "the bottom" and uranium is the heaviest element. Seems logical.
However, as with most erroneous memes in science, people have long thought that the earth's core was made of iron--at least that's what I recall from high school science class. I'd bet that assumption arose from the observation that the earth has a magnetic field. Never mind that spinning conductors also generate magnetic fields, and that the earth is spinning and that molten lava is probably a decent conductor too.
I guess the maveric theory claims that the uranium at the core is reacting in a fission proces that doesn't reach enough critical mass to blow the earth to bits, but instead works like most of our existing nuclear reactors--it heats the surrounding liquid--we obsere this every once in a while when a volcano blows.
If this theory is true, that means that there are lots of atomic particles flying out of this process at the core of the earth. Namely, lots of hydrogen and helium are getting produced. Has anyone every asked why we still even have helium floating around after several billions of years? You'd have figured it would have all floaated into space by now, unless it was being continuously generated.
What's interesting to contemplate is the process of how the hydrogen and helium make it from the core through the crust (they are light, and float to the top. There's lots of pressure down there, so the light gasses get forced through the crust.
As hot hydrogen gets forced through the crust, it will react with things--hydrogen is quite reactive. What happens when high pressure, hot hydrogen encounters organic deposits deep in the crust from eons past? It makes hydrocarbons. Oil is made of hyrocarbons. Petroleum engineers have often been puzzled by wells that continue to produce oil decades longer than was originally estimated. It's as if the oil were being "generated" from somewhere. I'm guessing that the hydrogen from the core is the source of this generation process.
We've been stuck thinking forever that the sun is the only source of continuous energy for our planet. What if we've also got a nuclear reactor in the core as well? If so, those oil wells are not really depleting assets, but may actually be growing their production.

Kenneth S. Deffeyes � Hubbert Peak of Oil Production

Kenneth S. Deffeyes � Hubbert Peak of Oil Production: What will happen when Oil production lags demand? Prices will continue to go up. Here's a controversial book on the topic that claims that we are at the peak.

Monday, November 15, 2004

WebRing--Evolutionary Biology

WebRing: hub I was following a link from "The Lucifer Principle" by Howard Bloom and ran across this novel list of web sites that cover various aspects of Evolutionary Biology, Paleoanthropology, and the like. It's a good collection of links for the subject matter. BTW, read "The Lucifer Principle"--if you haven't read the book, don't hold onto any point of view you may have on the forces in history too tightly.

Friday, November 12, 2004

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Fantasy Blog Share Market

BlogShares - Fantasy Blog Share Market This is the best idea I've seen yet for creating a leveraged model (ie lots of people working for free) that can keep track of blogs and identify the most popular ones. The site creates a "game" where people "invest" in different blog sites. The investment grows proportionally with the growth in links to the blogs they invest in. The site gives a rank order list of the most "valuable" blogs based upon links and also ranks the top "blog pickers".

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

128 bit storage limit

Jeff Bonwick's Weblog: "proof that 128 bit storage is really boiling the ocean"

Friday, October 15, 2004

Fractional Quantum State Hydrogen

Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in ``resonant transfer'' plasmas Randell Mills theory of classical quantum mechanics predicted that the hydrogen electron can exist at energy states below the n=1 ground state. This publication is the first time the "estabished" scientific community has allowed publication of the experiemental results that back up the theory.

About three years ago, I visited Mills' lab and saw an operating device as described in this paper. When I was a grad student at MIT in 1994, I was successful in replicating some of the experiemental results described here. While it's hard to believe on paper, I can say from first hand experience, the phenomenon is for real.

blinkx

blinkx I tried the X1 client search engine and was impressed, but the $100 price tag was too hard to swallow. Glad I waited--Blinkx is a generation ahead, it's free, and it combines web search with realtime desktop search. Everyone should have this on their machine.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

The Wealth of Nations

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Cool link that published the whole text of Adam Smith's landmark contribution to economics. Infinitely cheaper than buying it on Amazon.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster

The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster: "Crystal charges to email reports" Wow, sounds like BOBJ is stepping across the line to increase revenues. While some reporting vendors are trying to stimulate report usage across the organizaion, the recent Crystal licensing strategy will likely stifle adoption.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Sun's fighting chance

Sun's fighting chance: Excellent article on Sun's strategy to attack Red Hat. The next move will be Microsoft's claim that Linux contains some Windows code....I'm guessing that MSFT got a nice deal from Sun on their UNIX license to parallel the indemnification offered by Novell to Linux users. 10 years from now, folks will look back at this as the time when Linux crossed the tipping point to dominate the OS landscape and the incumbents became another chapter for Clayton Christensen.

Friday, September 17, 2004

Scaling Laws in the Functional Content of Genomes: Fundamental Constants of Evolution?

Scaling Laws in the Functional Content of Genomes: Fundamental Constants of Evolution?: "there is in fact a large array of genomic features that show power law distributions." This is a very cool observation about the structure of natural information systems.

DeepChip Homepage

DeepChip Homepage: This is the best survey of real customer opinions on the relative strength of DRC tools in the EDA market that I've seen.

Journal of Rampant Speculation

Journal of Rampant Speculation:
Very cool idea for breaking the "peer-review" bottleneck in science that inhibits discontinuous innovation.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

MJM Engineering Co -- Cryogenic Cooling

MJM Engineering Co -- Cryogenic Cooling: "supercool your chips"
For the extreme gaming system, you can multiply the speed of your computer by attaching a cryrogenic cooler. I talked to one guy who got a 4x increase in chip speed by cooling his pentium to liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Nouse--Nose-Steered Web Surfing System

Yahoo! News - Inventor Develops Nose-Steered Web Surfing System
This would be a killer app for laptops--the current replacements for mice in mobile computing are poor at best. This new technology holds a lot of promise for improving the human interface in mobile computing.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Skype

Skype
Now that Skype offers software for your PDA phone, you can walk into a WiFi hotspot and make a call to anywhere in the world for FREE. Of course, this assumes that your phone is 802.11 enables, which is rare and even more unlikely, the person you want to call on another continent is also a Skype user. Of course, you can still save money by using their discounted service to call internationally to a real land line. However, give this a couple years when most phones will have 802.11 and hotspots are more ubiquituous--what will the cell phone companies do for revenue then?

Friday, September 03, 2004

Spammers embrace email authentication | The Register

Spammers embrace email authentication The Register: "long as spammers comply with the protocol by not spoofing the sender address, their messages will not be stopped by SPF, which "

The only way the spam problem will get solved is when there is a cost associated with sending email. It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem from economic theory. Great Britain experience the same problem with their postal system 200 years ago when advertisers got the idea of using the printing press to do mass mailings--back in those days, the receiver of the mail paid for the postage. It became a big problem and almost killed the postal system until they invented stamps. The invention of stamps allowed senders to be charged for the mail. We need the electronic version of stamps to solve the spam problem. The great part is that normal people would probably never see the cost of the postage, as they send less than they receive--thus the cost of postage could be offset by the revenue from postage for normal people, while the spammer/advertisers end up paying for the system since they send more than they receive.

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Oasis provides respite from GDSII

SEMI's Oasis provides respite from GDSII

The biggest challenge for Moore's Law to continue is the ability to link the chip design process with the manufacturing design. Right now it cannot be effectively done because of the GDSII standard. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it is in any of the EDA vendors interest to adopt an open standard, as it would accelerate competitor for platforms they currently control.

Intel Updates Third-Quarter Business Expectations

Intel Updates Third-Quarter Business Expectations

Intel guided their revenue for the quarter down due to a global slowdown in consumer demand relative to expectations. The important point to note, is that they are still posting strong growth--there's a difference between slowing growth and negative growth. Semiconductor growth follows GDP, and GDP is still growing steadily. While we may be near the "top of the cycle", the market did not over heat, so it's unlikely to crash like it did in 2000. This reduction in volatility should actually make the prospects for the industry more favorable. Of course, the market only looks quarter to quarter and will discount Intel's stock for the short term change despite the long term benefit that will likely result.

First Posting

This is the first post on the Techbuzz weblog. This will be a collection of novel weblinks and observations that I've made doing analysis of the technology market place.