Kewl, but...

Kewl. However, I wonder how this could be related to fanfics as a reference to James' discussions lately and the so-called remix culture.

That Funky Cheronbyl Fungal Groove

Some fungi eat radiation to fuel their growth, a new study has found.

Three species of fungi containing the black pigment melanin—a substance also present in human skin—grew larger and faster when exposed to high levels of radiation, even when deprived of nutrients.

A similar response was not seen in fungi lacking the pigment, as well as in fungi that did not receive the radiation exposure.

Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at New York's Yeshiva University were inspired by previous observations of enhanced fungus growth inside the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear reactor, after the Ukrainian facility exploded in 1986.

The team performed a series of experiments to test whether the fungi could be harvesting radiation to fuel their own growth, much like plants do when they capture solar energy through photosynthesis.

In addition to the faster fungal growth, the researchers noted changes in the electrical structure of the melanin exposed to radiation.

Lead researcher Ekaterina Dadachova said these observations suggest that the pigment may play a role similar to that of chlorophyll in plants, which traps energy from sunlight and converts it to "food energy" needed to sustain life.

"We have associated the faster growth caused by radiation with melanin—a phenomenon suggesting that the pigment is somehow involved in harvesting high-energy ionizing radiation and promoting growth, she said.

THis might be completely irrelevant. The end times ecologies could be damned interesting and post phytic. kewl! Even kewler if they could develop into very large macroscopic structures.

Is that a Potato in Your Tank?

he hydrogen economy is not a futuristic concept. The U.S. Department of Energy's 2006 Advance Energy Initiative calls for competitive ethanol from plant sources by 2012 and a good selection of hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles by 2020.

Researchers at Virginia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Georgia propose using polysaccharides, or sugary carbohydrates, from biomass to directly produce low-cost hydrogen for the new hydrogen economy.

According to the DOE, advances are needed in four areas to make hydrogen fuel an economical reality for transportation – production, storage, distribution, and fuel cells. Most industrial hydrogen currently comes from natural gas, which has become expensive. Storing and moving the gas, whatever its source, is costly and cumbersome, and even dangerous. And there is little infrastructure for refueling a vehicle.

"We need a simple way to store and carry hydrogen energy and a simple process to produce hydrogen, said Y.-H. Percival Zhang, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech.

Using synthetic biology approaches, Zhang and colleagues Barbara R. Evans and Jonathan R. Mielenz of ORNL and Robert C. Hopkins and Michael W.W. Adams of the University of Georgia are using a combination of 13 enzymes never found together in nature to completely convert polysaccharides (C6H10O5) and water into hydrogen when and where that form of energy is needed. This "synthetic enzymatic pathway"research appears in the May 23 issue of PLoS ONE, the online, open-access journal from the Public Library of Science (www.plosone.org).

Polysaccharides like starch and cellulose are used by plants for energy storage and building blocks and are very stable until exposed to enzymes. Just add enzymes to a mixture of starch and water and "the enzymes use the energy in the starch to break up water into only carbon dioxide and hydrogen,"Zhang said.

A membrane bleeds off the carbon dioxide and the hydrogen is used by the fuel cell to create electricity. Water, a product of that fuel cell process, will be recycled for the starch-water reactor. Laboratory tests confirm that it all takes place at low temperature -- about 86 degrees F -- and atmospheric pressure.

The vision is for the ingredients to be mixed in the fuel tank of your car, for instance. A car with an approximately 12-gallon tank could hold 27 kilograms (kg) of starch, which is the equivalent of 4 kg of hydrogen. The range would be more than 300 miles, Zhang estimates. One kg of starch will produce the same energy output as 1.12 kg (0.38 gallons) of gasoline.

dude. Wow.

Okay. Seriousness time and political advocacy aside, this tech has a long ways to go. However, the idea that we drive over to a station and fill up with, oh, corn starch or potato starch is just plain amusing. I am sure that we can make the enzymes cheaper through one of the biotech companies going fullbore with a recombinant bacteria or yeast.

Hey, Carlos, what do you know/think on this one?

Brown Dwarf with Jets

Jets of matter have been discovered around a very low mass 'failed star', mimicking a process seen in young stars. This suggests that these 'brown dwarfs' form in a similar manner to normal stars but also that outflows are driven out by objects as massive as hundreds of millions of solar masses down to Jupiter-sized objects.

The brown dwarf with the name 2MASS1207-3932 is full of surprises [1]. Its companion, a 5 Jupiter-mass giant, was the first confirmed exoplanet for which astronomers could obtain an image (see ESO 23/04 and 12/05), thereby opening a new field of research - the direct detection of alien worlds. It was then later found (see ESO 19/06) that the brown dwarf has a disc surrounding it, not unlike very young stars.

Now, astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have found that the young brown dwarf is also spewing jets, a behaviour again quite similar to young stars.

This ought to have some interesting implications for anyone looking to place a habitable world around a BD.

Petascale Systems Integration into Large Scale Facilties workshop

I didn't get to go to this. I really wanted to, but, unfortunately, work and life conspired against me. My wife has finals this week and she needed me home pronto to take care of our daughter and cook, etc, so she could study. Also I was on rotation from last Tuesday until today. Bleh.

There was some discussion of the workshop after the fact and there was a sense of disappointment wrt to it because there was a lot of 'the problems we're going to face are the problems that we have been' at least as far as integration into existing sites. One of the anecdotes though that was related back to me was what was done for LLNL and their petascale system. They have a multiple hundred million dollar budget for it and they are supposed to get 30 megawatts - yes, thirty fscking megawatts - as an upgrade to their building for HPC systems. The whole East SF Bay, so goes that same source, is only 90 megawatts in usage now. Now, as an exercise, start scaling up for that 500 petaflop system that the climatologist quoted in that presentation I mention now and again. um, yeah, can you say very dedicated power source?

Another anecdote that was related, and I think you, Horst, are the source (if you're reading) - was that with the vast numbers of processors that petascale systems are going to be - and MPP doesn't even begin to describe it! We're talking 100s of 1000s here - the equivalent would be like programming the old 68k line processors from Motorola and programming such that you tell each and every transistor when it should expect a one or zero by hand. Possible, marginally, but insanely inefficient for effective and timely coding. The current models for coding parallel programs will have to be dumped. There were few, according to my source, suggestions on how to go about it. Even though systems on that scale are rapidly approaching. (Sorry if I mangled your analogy, Horst, feel free to correct).

Thoughts of managing such a system with a 99.99% reliability with 100s of 1000s of processors just gives me a headache even thinking about it. 10 nodes down and requiring a sysadmin to work on them at any given time.

Anyone that intends on talking to me about the Pending Singularity better be ready to be giggled at as far as I am concerned.

No F-22 Raptor for Japan...because of China?

Pro-China officials in the White House and Pentagon are quietly undermining Japan's request to buy 50 advanced F-22 jet fighter-bombers, to avoid upsetting Beijing's government, according to U.S. officials familiar with the dispute.

Japan's Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma made a formal request to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates earlier this month for classified technical data on the jet, as a first step toward a purchase.

The Japanese view the advanced warplane as a key element of a military modernization needed to counter current missile threats from North Korea and a longer-term threat from China.

Air Force officials and defense industry officials, however, said officials at the National Security Council and within the office of the secretary of defense are opposing the sale, and plan to delay acting on Japan's request until after a September deadline, when Tokyo will then be forced to look for other jets to upgrade its aging aircraft arsenal.

[...]

China opposes F-22 sales since the ultra-modern fighter-bomber can carry large numbers of precision guided bombs, can hit targets at long ranges, and has anti-radar stealth that can evade all of China's air defenses.

Both the Air Force and the F-22 manufacturer, Lockheed Martin Corp., favor building an export version of the F-22 to reduce unit costs, now estimated to be around $150 million per jet, and to bolster the alliance with Japan. South Korea, Australia and Israel also are interested in buying the F-22.

The export version would require a lot more money because they have to downgrade individual systems a nontrivial amount, so there is some question whether or not there would really be a savings through economies of scale. SO! These may be some spinning by LockMart et al going on here because they want more sales. OTOH, there very well may be some work by the PRC friendly types in the administration to ixnay this. The reason being that Japan with true stealth aircraft would be about as popular with other Asian nations as Japan with carriers.

BOOK MEME!

- Bold the ones you’ve read
- Italicize the ones you want to read
- Leave unaltered the ones that you aren’t interested in or haven’t heard of

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (JRR Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (JRR Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (JK Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (JK Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (JK Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
68. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
69. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
70. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
71. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
72. Shogun (James Clavell)
73. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
74. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
75. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
76. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
77. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
78. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
79. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
80. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
81. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
82. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
83. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
84. Emma (Jane Austen)
85. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
86. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
87. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
88. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
89. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
90. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
91. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
92. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
93. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
94. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
95. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
96. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
97. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
98. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
99. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Hell! it's About Time!

As you might guess, I am here at work on rotation for a problem on one of our machines. Hopefully I'll be leaving here momentarily and heading home after I get confirmation from IBM that they have received the data collect and that they will have someone out to replace the part. However I noticed an email from a friend about one of the computer games that I used to obsess over ten years ago. It's a game that was damned fun, but it had serious consequences for some friends and but for the grace of god, I didn't join them.

The Dragon's Tales gets its name from the screen name that I used for gaming: I was Dragon[ka] and ended up being pretty damned good at Starcraft. I found that I had an absolutely useless talent for Real-time strategy games. It wasn't the only one that I played and was good at: Total Annihilation, Red Alert, Age of Empires, and the culmination and last game that I would play extensively before my marriage was Empire Earth. I was very good at EE, but Starcraft was pretty much my favourite though.

I always played Terran. I was never a siege tank terror or anything like that. I had two tactics that I became infamous for. The first was the Opposed Drop: I'd max out on marines and dropships, fly in right over the enemy base, and UNLOAD and stim the crap out of my marines. With medics. Tres carnage. The tactic that ended up evolving as the end game was the Battlecruiser rush. I cranked BCs faster than anyone that I ever knew. Others would try. Damned if they didn't try. Heh. I was noted for being very aggressive in the game and also being The Cockroach. If you didn't outgiht kill me, I was NOT out of the game at all.

I had one friend that he and his wife used to play SC extensively say that said, "We have this game down to a science. It used to be an exact science until Dragon [moi] showed up with his fucking BCs." (Loved ya too, Noah!) Later on, the game would devolve down to a slug fest between Mynok and myself. It really was a lot of fun. It also ate a hell of a lot of time.

The event that I repeatedly call my "But for the Grace of God" Moment happens to be the fiasco of Bnetd. One of the main developers on it, Ross, was my best man at my first wedding. I had originally planned on writing some code for bnetd myself to help with the enhancements. The whole section in the code for statistics was based off of ideas that I related back to Ross (and I am sure were enhanced after the fact). Originally, I was going to do it, but as the greater personal events of the time period unfolded and my new job out at HELSTF ate my time I didn't have the time or inclination to code for fun at that juncture. Just because of that, I avoided getting my ass sued off by a vindictive, asinine Blizzard.

I used to have an extraordinarily ambitious asshole inside me. He was tempered by the shocking losses - a divorce, multiple suicides - that rattled my world just prior to the release of Starcraft. I was knocked on my ass - bad - and my faith in myself knocked down pretty hard. For those of you that knew me during that period from 1997 to 1999, you know of what I speak. Some wounds, no matter how long the time passes, never heal. These won't, but I've grown and grown much stronger since then.

On Saturday, a very good friend and old roomie emailed me that Blizzard had announced Starcraft 2. The timing couldn't have been more appropriate.

Something happened on Friday that shook me up. I had a nasty surprise at work and it was not of the positive sort: something that I thought I had received back in January turned out to have been a typo (!!! WTF?!). I found out through other paperwork that I needed get done for something else the reality of the situation. I was first shocked and a bit depressed. Then it grew to some damned serious anger. With some patient counsel from my wife and my daughter's laughter, I have calmed down, chilled out, and put it into some perspective.

It made me realize that I had been getting a bit too complacent. I had been taking more time to get certain projects underway that I should have moved faster: nothing hurt me, just didn't get done what I wanted. I have certain things that I want to accomplish before I leave NERSC. I have two papers that are in various states of completion. I have a new project (and associated papers to get underway and coupler code) to get launched and its a doozie. I also have a pair of clusters that I need to completely revamp in the process. And some records to break. My mark to leave here and upon HPC. That's not all. I have projects outside of work - ones that will facilitate me leaving here and even transitioning to a new field eventually - and others that have been simmering and cooking slowly with almost glacial progress.

Enough. If this were an RTS, I'd say it was long past time for a multifront assault upon reality.

Rage. Rage. Rage. RAGE. Rage can be a constructive emotion. Anger makes a good fire to temper a very sharp sword. The Beast consumes. This rage, this beast awoke the ambitious asshole. His only comment was

"Hell! It's about time. It's about gawddamn, fucking time!"

That Future Biotic World Building Exercise

Basic TL:
Hadean Æon              -4500 to -3800 Million Years

Archæn Æon              -3800 to -2500 Million Years

Proterozoic Æon
 Vendian Period      -600  to -542 Million Years

Phanerozoic Æon
 Paleozoic Era       -542  to -251 Million Years
 Mesozoic Era        -251  to -65 Million Years
 Cenozoic Era        -65   to +130 Million Years
 Nothezoic Era       +130  to +630 Million Years
 Postnothozoic Era   +630  to +1080 Million Years

Postmarian Æon
 Macrozoic Era       +1080 to + 1530 Million Years
 Microzoic Era       +1530 to +1890 Million Years

Paravenerian Æon        +1890 to +5500 Million Years

Fornaxian Æon           +5500 to +5567 Million Years

Cinisian Æon            5567 Million Years +

Any comments? Questions? This is a group work, but Seth Deitch set out the basics first.

Giant Salamander

Another Yalta Accord?!

Russia's present confrontation with the West, unlike the Cold War standoff, covers not only military and political issues, but also economic and financial ones. During the Cold War Russo-U.S. summits were grand events that centered on nuclear arms control and often effectively defused East-West tensions on many issues. Nowadays summits are not that effective. Attempts to solve problems the old way -- by trying to revitalize Russo-U.S. nuclear arms control -- do not help to clear other obstacles.

The joint visits to Moscow by Rice and Steinmeier did not and could not do much. At least everyone, including the Russians, put on a brave face and pretended that it is still business as usual and that the problems between Russia and the West are not as bad as they are.

Separately the United States and the EU cannot bridge the present East-West rift. The EU cannot do much about planed U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe. Nor is Washington too concerned about Russian plans to scrap CFE, since the Pentagon has installed a superb intelligence-gathering network that gives it more information about the Russian military than the CFE confidence-building regime of notification and onsite inspection. Of course, the Pentagon does not share much of its intelligence with European allies. European states have been shocked by the apparent sudden end of CFE, while Washington is much more concerned about Iraq, Iran, and the situation in, say, Georgia.

Last week in Brussels Russia's chief of the General Staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, told NATO generals the Russian Defense and Foreign Ministry lawyers are working on ways to implement President Vladimir Putin's declaration of a "moratorium" on CFE observance (RIA-Novosti, May 10). In fact Russian diplomats say openly that Putin's CFE "moratorium" is a legal impossibility and only a formal abrogation is possible (see EDM, May 2). At present officials do not know what to do next and are waiting for additional guidance from the Kremlin.

For the Kremlin the CFE and most other multiple issues that today wreck relations with the West are not, in fact, decisive. Russia is today reasserting itself and wants a new grand pact with the West, something like the Yalta accord of 1945, that would clearly delineate Russia’s new sphere of imperial influence in Europe and Asia, with the West assuring noninterference within that zone. Today even if the West would want to make such a deal, there is no legal framework within which to negotiate.

Another Yalta Accord?! uh. No. And I am unsure that is exactly what the Russians are seeking, truthfully.

A Future Evolution TL

Over at the Alternate Evolution Yahoo Group - the only one I am in - we've started putting together a TL of future evolution. We're going through the whole background bit first. Drawing up the eras, the continental drift, etc. Then we'll tackle the actual biological evolution. Hopefully, it won't either fizzle or get hung up on arguments between members. I'd be one of those that could lock horns of certain things (*cough* mammals eating the eggs of dinosaurs stuff *cough*).

Come read or participate.

Asia Saves US? Or Dooms Us?

Asian desert dust and city pollution is swirling in vast plumes across the Pacific to North America, interacting with storms and possibly spurring climate change, an airborne scientist said on Tuesday.

[...]

Ice crystals are found in extremely cold clouds, and when the crystals are composed entirely of frozen water, they reflect lots of sunlight -- that's why these clouds look so white, Ramanathan said by telephone after the Web chat.

However, if particles of dust and a dark pollutant known as black carbon managed to get inside the crystals, these clouds might absorb more solar energy rather than reflecting it all, Ramanathan said.

One World. One Atmosphere. ;)

A Very Harsh OpEd

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych’s opinions about the country he rules should not be viewed in isolation by anyone interested in Ukraine or the EU. First and foremost it must be stressed that his neo-Soviet Party of Regions is not a “normal” political party in a “normal” state.

It is a restorationist party that seeks to prevent the democratization of a de facto “post-colonial” state, and to keep it subordinated to its former ruler. Should it succeed the EU would have to face the prospect of an unstable eastern border.

While the party formally supports “Eurointegration” – just as Putin supports the Eurointegration of Russia – it has not explicitly stated that it stands for for “EU membership for Ukraine.” Yanukovych’s public statements in various EU countries, therefore, cannot be taken seriously until this commitment is clearly stated in his party’s program.

Given this omission there is every reason to believe that as soon as it manages to create a majority by dubious methods in the Verkhovna Rada, it will first incorporate Ukraine into Russia's Single Economic Space and the, and only then, via Russia, “integrate into Europe” – presumably just like Belarus.

That's perhaps a little stronger than the reality, at least in my not so humble opinion. He seems more interested in just holding onto power for himself and his cronies than anything else.

Anyone else think...

...that this thing looks like a trilobite?

Sorry

The paleo post is delayed because i am on rotation and having oh-so-much fun. It's also impacting any chance of getting out a Byzantine WI on SHWI: Totila, Soldier of Rome.

Antarctica's Melting Snow (see Map Below)

DOE Calls For Supercomputing Proposals

This is how you get on our machines with a LARGE allocation and priority for use. If you have the ability, propose!

Covered in Hot! Solid! Water!

An odd planet the size of Neptune, made mostly of hot, solid water, has been discovered not far from Earth and offers evidence that other planets may be covered with oceans, European astronomers reported on Wednesday.

Called GJ 436b, the planet orbits quickly around a cool, red star just 30 light-years away, the team at the Geneva Observatory said.

"It's not a very welcoming planet," Frederic Pont, an astronomer who helped make the discovery, said in a telephone interview. The planet is hot because it is near its star and under high pressure because of its mass.

"The water is frozen by the pressure but it's hot. It's a bit strange -- we are used to water changing conditions because of temperature, but in fact water can also be solidified by pressure," Pont said.

The planet is also likely blanketed by hydrogen, the researchers said -- conditions hardly conducive to life. But if there is water, there could be water on other planets in other solar systems and thus life as we know it.

"It shows there are many ocean planets," Pont said.

The universe continues to surprise and delight.

I Hate...

Getting Stuck on stuff that ought to be obvious crap. bah.