Rarely in Isolation

To most people, the sole inventor of calculus was Issac Newton, something not true (Newton disputed this fact bitterly) as great ideas rarely come from just one person i.e., Charles Darwin & Alfred Wallace/Evolution, Alan Turing & John VonNeumann/computing, but rather, in this case, two; Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz but Gottfied, the distinguished personage seen above, created something else of some merit,  the binary numeral system, the basis for all things digital, a notion, I'll bet, even the great and irascible Newton wished he had done while writing his great Principia Mathmatica.

Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern binary numeral system. As a Sinophile, Leibniz was aware of the I Ching and noted with fascination how its hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 0 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired.^[8]

Inside Job - Is Now Online

Inside Job is now online, ready to be viewed and commented on. 

After seeing this, one should ask the magic question... 

Why aren't these bastards in jail?!!!

The Epicurean Dealmaker: Welcome to Duloc!

The Epicurean Dealmaker: Welcome to Duloc!

Interesting site. MC recommended me to check it out. Maybe you, my faithful readers, might also. An investment banker with 'tude and smarts. Not a bad place to be at.  - Robert E.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

                

Seen above is a radiation dose chart depicting what excess amounts of radiation can do to the human body. Needless to say, the effects of same are not pretty, something rather disquieting to say the least while watching the nuclear fubar unfold in Japan.  Another interesting note is the fact mainline news is now saying the "worst is over and that the impact of this multi tiered meltdown will have little impact to the Japanese economy" even though 1, the plants supplied 30% of Japan's energy, 2, Japan has no natural resources and 3...

"Radiation 1,600 times higher than normal levels has been detected in an area about 20 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, International Atomic Energy Agency officials said Monday.

which means the...

Data collected by an IAEA team show that radiation levels of 161 microsievert per hour have been detected in the town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, the officials said.

and

The government has set an exclusion zone covering areas within a 20-km radius of the plant and has urged people within 20 to 30 km to stay indoors."

But it's still ok even though.. 

"On Sunday, one measurement 58 km from Fukushima registered 5.7 microsieverts per hour, the IAEA said in data provided to reporters.

which means

... people would be exposed to the IAEA's annual recommended maximum radiation of one millisievert within about seven days.

and

The IAEA assumes that receiving more than one millisieverts per year, in addition to the dose from naturally occurring radiation, raises long-term cancer risk."

but the worst is over, right? Ah, perhaps not Grasshopper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert

161 microsieverts/hour = 3.86 millisieverts/day = 1410 mSv/year

Yearly dose examples

• Sleeping next to a human for 8 hours every night: 0.02 mSv/yr[9]
• Cosmic radiation (from sky) at sea level: 0.24 mSv/year[7]
• Natural radiation in the human body: 0.40 mSv/year[7]
• New York-Tokyo flights for airline crew: 9 mSv/year[10]
• Total average radiation dose for Americans: 6.2 mSv/year[13]
• Smoking 1.5 packs/day: 13-60 mSv/year[11][12]
• Current average limit for nuclear workers: 20 mSv/year[10]
• Background radiation in parts of Iran, India and Europe: 50 mSv/year[10]
• Elevated limit for workers during Fukushima emergency: 250 mSv/year[14

Sounds like the BP drill all over again whereby the oil miraculously disappeared within 11 months just in time for Spring Break save for the inconvenient Washington's Blog post titled New Oil Spill in Gulf ... 100-Mile Slick putting forth little tidbits ignored by the media because it's "old news" not worthy of our attention while American Idol and Charlie Sheen's meltdown is. 

Oh, and by the way, the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill did not magically disappear. Here is a roundup of some of the news from the Gulf of Mexico from the first couple of weeks of March:

Addendum: "As for Hitachinaka City, which according to SPEEDI has seen a surge in radiation over the past 24 hours, things are far worse: "Hitachinaka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, saw the highest radioactive values recorded, with 12,000 becquerels of cesium, iodine and 85,000 becquerels." 

The Physicality of Data

Computing is a physical process even though the content itself cannot be directly touched or manipulated save by a quantum driven device able to handle electrons and photons with consummate ease. BRT covered the physical aspect of data, in part, years ago in a piece titled A Dangerous Thing using various sources to determine how much would the web's data-set weigh in 2010. The guesstimate back in the 2007 article was that the net's 14.6 Exabytes (10% of the world's data output) would be equivalent to the weight of a small pebble. Seems the forecasters I quoted this information from underestimated our ability to babble on by a factor of 8.2, or the weight of a small stone.

"According to the annual survey of the global digital output by International Data Corporation, the total amount of global data was expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes sometime during 2010. This is equivalent to the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on the microblogging site Twitter continuously for a century.[5]"

With this information in mind, an excellent article from the NY Times titled The Digital Pileup, reinforces the physicality of data in spades.

"Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive. The data centers dotting the globe, colloquially known as “server farms,” are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but must also be cooled. In the United States, it’s estimated that server farms, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 3 percent of our national power supply. Worldwide, they use more power annually than Sweden."

What's even more interesting is the fact data overload is really just beginning...

"The current volume estimate of all electronic information is roughly 1.2 zettabytes, the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century. That includes everything from e-mail to YouTube. More stunning: 75 percent of the information is duplicative. By 2020, experts estimate that the volume will be 44 times greater than it was in 2009. There finally may be, in fact, T.M.I."

T.M.I, I am guessing, either refers to the Duran Duran Too Much Information tune or to The Police's 

Managing the ravenous data beast in a society dependent on non renewable energy creation is a non starter, a situation that must be changed if we are to remain a viable civilization in the 21st century. (Viable sustainable energy tech, as stated many times before in BRT, is in the lab but getting it into the real world able to replace the nuclear and fossil methodologies in cost-effective manner is another matter all together.)

The 2nd law of Thermodynamics strikes again.

MERS

Seems the NY Times finally caught up with BRT regarding the mortgage furbar perpetrated by the banks and related parties including MERS, the 50 man operation miraculously able to keep tabs on 60 million mortgages while not even investing one dollar in the management and ownership of same. For the BRT take on this, check out Habius Corpus or Hey Dude, Where's My Mortgage?

Never heard of MERS? That’s fine with the mortgage banking industry—as MERS is starting to overheat and sputter. If its many detractors are correct, this private corporation, with a full-time staff of fewer than 50 employees, could turn out to be a very public problem for the mortgage industry.


Judges, lawmakers, lawyers and housing experts are raising piercing questions about MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, whose private mortgage registry has all but replaced the nation’s public land ownership records. Most questions boil down to this:


How can MERS claim title to those mortgages, and foreclose on homeowners, when it has not invested a dollar in a single loan?


And, more fundamentally: Given the evidence that many banks have cut corners and made colossal foreclosure mistakes, does anyone know who owns what or owes what to whom anymore?

BRT is not a news outlet by any stretch of the imagination but it's nice to be out in front of something as sleazy as the mortgage fiasco foisted upon us by the Wall Street Banksters and the Federal Reserve along with significant others (Government, Regulatory etc., etc.) don't you think?

"Same as it ever was." - Talking Heads

Smart Dust

Smart Dust or computers the size of dust motes are here, courtesy of the University of Michigan.

"Bell's Law says there's a new class of smaller, cheaper computers about every decade. With each new class, the volume shrinks by two orders of magnitude and the number of systems per person increases. The law has held from 1960s' mainframes through the '80s' personal computers, the '90s' notebooks and the new millennium's smart phones."

The dawn of truly immersive computing is nigh. Is society ready for this?

"One never knows, do one?" - Fats Waller

Interdependency Writ Large

If you want to kill time while learning something of real value, one can do far worse then browsing the Global Dependency Explorer, an interactive gem that makes the CIA World Fact Book come alive with an exquisite set of real time interconnected charts showing the commercial interdependencies of most of the world's countries in real time. Enjoy

Stone Soup

A person I would have love to have had a conversation with is Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who not only invented computing (John Von Neuman was the other player in that endeavor) and AI but also was, until now, an unrecognized leading researcher of chaos via his seminal paper titled."The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," whereby the interaction of a wide range of chemicals can give rise to patterns of incredible complexity ranging from leopard spots and patterns on seashells and fish to the branching of avoeli in lungs. Even more amazing is the fact his theory may extend to the formation of galaxies as the distribution patterns scale from the cellular to the galactic without distortion and without the need of chemical interaction, something guaranteed to astound as Turing wrote his paper well before his tragic suicide in 1954. 

At the heart of any Turing pattern is a so-called reaction-diffusion system. It consists of an "activator," a chemical that can make more of itself; an "inhibitor," that slows production of the activator; and a mechanism for diffusing the chemicals.


Many combinations of chemicals can fit this system: What matters isn't their individual identity, but how they interact, with concentrations oscillating between high and low and spreading across an area. These simple units then suffice to produce very complex patterns.


Or, in essence


"Nature abhors gradients"- Into the Cool

Beyond Real Time - The HG Beckons

Beyond Real Time, as stated in one of the the first posts of this "wonderful" blog, is the holy grail of computing whereby anything happening faster then 1/60th of a second cannot be perceived by man. (More like 1/75th) but who's arguing:). The BRT limit has long been surpassed in all things dealing with word processing and other tasks not requiring intense compute power but for high res 3D graphics and page downloads from websites, the BRT HG objective still holds. With this in mind, check out the video seen above of a beta of the Nvidia Quad Core Tegra/Kal El processor doing it's thing in a beta rev Motorola's Xoom regarding site page loads. OMG anyone?

The screen resolution of the device also reaches another HG milestone, 300dpi, the same res used in high end 4/C print images, something only dreamed about one year ago, let alone in a device targeted to cost about $600 at the end of 2011.

"Today at Mobile World Congress (MWC), we demonstrated this little beauty running in an Android tablet. We not only showed that it was alive. We showed it browsing the Web, running games and streaming amazing video. This wasn’t your average amazing video. It was 1440p video content running on a 2560×1600 panel. That will enable mobile devices to output to the highest resolution monitors or tablets equipped with a 10.1-inch display with 300 DPI."

When power is combined with low power requirements and small form factor, magic happens. I, for one, can't wait.