Category Archives: Technology

Read the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog in 35 Languages

I have added a Google gadget to the right side column of the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog that translates our blog into 35 languages. I have been proving a direct link to 6 languages, so this is a great increase in languages covered.

All that is required to add this capability to your site is add a short bit of javascript from the Google Translate gadget site. And as they add more languages that additional coverage will automatically be reflected on your site.

The usability of the Google translate is excellent, I think. If you are reading the translated page, say in Chinese, and you follow a link to another page on our site it translates that page for you automatically.

I hope you enjoy this new capability.

Open Source Abandoned by OLPC

Not Free at Any Price by Richard M. Stallman

When the OLPC appeared, it fell one step short of full freedom: the highly publicized wireless mesh network device, which allows OLPCs to connect to the Internet through nearby OLPCs, required a non-free program. This piece of non-free code prevented me from fully endorsing the OLPC. But that would not stop me from using one: I would just have to delete the non-free code and do without the internal wireless device.

The OLPC had practical inconveniences, too: no internal hard disk, a small screen, and a tiny keyboard. In December 2007 I test-drove the OLPC with an external keyboard, and concluded I could use it with an external disk despite the small screen. I decided to switch.
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If you want to support a venture to distribute low-priced laptops to children, wait a few months, then choose one that donates MIPS-based machines that run entirely free software. That way you can be sure to give the gift of freedom.

He is more anti-microsoft than I am but I agree with this contention that what we should support is a open source solution to provide laptops to children around the world. It is a shame, I really liked the potential for OLPC. I still wish them success I just am not interesting in directly supporting that effort but instead would like an alternative open source solution.

The Sylvania Netbook is available from Amazon now with the Ubuntu operating system (linux version). I use Ubuntu and it is excellent.

Undersea Cables Cut Again – Reducing India’s Capacity by 65%

Once again a severed underwater cable has disrupted web access

Internet and phone communications between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have been seriously disrupted after submarine cables were severed. It is thought the FLAG FEA, SMW4, and SMW3 lines, near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt, have all been cut.

A fault was also reported on the GO submarine cable 130km off Sicily. Experts warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and said the knock on effect could have serious repercussions on regional economies.
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It is thought that 65% of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan have also been severely affected.

Earlier this year, the same line was damaged in the same area – off the Egyptian coast – although only two lines were snapped then. “We’ve lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we’re looking at a total blackout in the Middle East,” said Mr Wright.

“These three circuits account for 90% of the traffic and we’re going to see more international phone calls dropping and a huge degradation in the quality of local internet,” he added.

“Normally you would expect to see one major break per cable per year. With four you should have an insurance policy. For this to happen twice in one year, on the same cable, is a serious cause for concern.”

RoboCup: Robot Football (Soccer)

RoboCup aims to, by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in football. As the video shows the teams have a ways to go. But this seems like a great process.

Engineers and Scientists in Congress

I started maintaining a list of Congressmen with PhDs and graduate degrees in science, engineering and math awhile back.

Please comment with any additions that you know of.

The following were re-elected:
Vernon Ehlers, Michigan, physics PhD; Rush Holt, New Jersey, physics PhD; John Olver, Massachusetts, chemistry PhD; Brian Baird, Washington, psychology PhD; Bill Foster, Illinois, physics PhD.

Other scientists, engineers and mathematicians that were reelected include: Ron Paul, Texas, biology BS, MD; Jerry McNerney, California, mathematics PhD; Dan Lipinski, Illinois, mechanical engineering BS, engineering-economic systems MS; Todd Akin, Mississippi, management engineering BS;Cliff Stearns, Florida, electrical engineering BS; Louise Slaughter, New York, microbiology BS; Joe Barton, Texas, industrial engineering BS, Pete Stark, California, engineering BS, Mike Honda, California.

Lost: Nancy Boyda, Kansas (BS chemistry).

Newly elected: Bill Cassidy, Louisiana (BS Biochemistry, MD); Pete Olson, Texas (BA computer science); Kurt Schrader, Oregon (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine); Martin Heinrich, New Mexico (BS engineering), Gregg Harper, Mississippi (BS chemistry), Joseph Cao, Mississippi (BA physics); Brett Guthrie, Virginia (BS mathematical economics); Erik Paulsen, Minnesota, mathematics BA; Parker Griffith, Alabama (BS chemistry, MD); Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming (BS animal science and biology).

Before you leap to the conclusion that scientists are taking over Congress, remember 2 things: 1) I have probably been missing plenty that were in congress already and 2) this is still a total of less than 10% with even a BS in science, math or engineering. I attempted to determine the status of all those newly elected this year.

Please comment, if you know of others in Congress with science and engineering backgrounds. If we get this list to be relative close to accurate then we can start tracking the total representation in congress and see if it is increasing, decreasing or randomly fluctuating over time.

Freeware Wi-Fi app turns iPod into a Phone

image of iPod Touch

Wireless turns iPod into a phone

A freeware application for the iPod Touch can turn the music player into a virtual mobile phone. Truphone uses wi-fi technology in an iPod Touch to allow users to make calls to other iPod Touch owners and Google Talk’s messaging service users.

The software is a spin-off from technology Truphone developed for smartphones and iPhones. The developers plan to have the ability to make calls to and from landlines in place very soon.

Geraldine Wilson – Truphone’s CEO – said the firm had ambitions to become a global internet player. “There are a slew of new features we’re rolling out for the iPod Touch that will let users call landlines, Skype users or send instant messages. We’re talking weeks, not months, before these go live.” Although Truphone technology can, in theory, work on any mobile device, the firm is concentrating on devices that have an application store.
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The company said Google’s Android operating system would be the next platform for which it will develop the Truphone applications.

From the Truphone site:

Nokia and iPhone users can make Truphone calls from any Wi-Fi zone, anywhere in the world. We’ll use your Wi-Fi connection to route the call over the internet at our amazing flat worldwide rates (see rate checker), saving you loads of money on international calls from your home country and saving you even more on calls when you’re abroad.

Wi-Fi calls to other connected Truphone users are completely free of charge. From wherever, to wherever.

Very cool. See our gadgets and gifts store.

HHMI on Science 2.0: Information Revolution

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute does great things for science and for open science. They have an excellent article in their HHMI Bulletin – Science 2.0: You Say You Want a Revolution?

Cross-pollination among research disciplines is in fact at the core of many other popular science blogs. Michael Eisen, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, is an avid blog reader who particularly enjoys John Hawks’ site on paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution. A recent post there discussed a new sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. “It’s like a conduit into another whole world,” says Eisen.
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The current extreme of collaboration via Science 2.0 is OpenWetWare.org. Begun in 2003 by Austin Che, who was then a computer science and biology graduate student at MIT, this biological-engineering Website uses the wiki model to showcase protocols and lab books: everything is open and can be edited by any of its 4,000 members.
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“Most publishers wish open access would go away,” says Brown. It won’t. Major research-funding organizations, including NIH, HHMI, and the Wellcome Trust, now require their grantees to post their findings on openaccess Websites such as PLoS or PubMed Central within 12 months of publication in traditional journals. Publishers are pushing back, however, and in September, the House Judiciary Committee began holding hearings on whether the federal government should be allowed to require grantees to submit accepted papers to a free archive.

von Neumann Architecture and Bottleneck

We each use computers a great deal (like to write this blog and read this blog) but often have little understanding of how a computer actually works. This post gives some details on the inner workings of your computer.
What Your Computer Does While You Wait

People refer to the bottleneck between CPU and memory as the von Neumann bottleneck. Now, the front side bus bandwidth, ~10GB/s, actually looks decent. At that rate, you could read all of 8GB of system memory in less than one second or read 100 bytes in 10ns. Sadly this throughput is a theoretical maximum (unlike most others in the diagram) and cannot be achieved due to delays in the main RAM circuitry.
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Sadly the southbridge hosts some truly sluggish performers, for even main memory is blazing fast compared to hard drives. Keeping with the office analogy, waiting for a hard drive seek is like leaving the building to roam the earth for one year and three months. This is why so many workloads are dominated by disk I/O and why database performance can drive off a cliff once the in-memory buffers are exhausted. It is also why plentiful RAM (for buffering) and fast hard drives are so important for overall system performance.

Demystifying the Memristor

Demystifying the memristor

The memristor — short for memory resistor – could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there’s no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain.
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By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, the team makes possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that take advantage of its ability to retain information.

“This opens up a whole new door in thinking about how chips could be designed and operated,” Williams says.

Engineers could, for example, develop a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (D-RAM). Computers using conventional D-RAM lack the ability to retain information once they are turned off. When power is restored to a D-RAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data stored on a magnetic disk required to run the system.

Federal Circuit Decides Software No Longer Patentable

The Bilski Decision Is In: Buh-Bye [Most] Business Methods Patents

This was an appeal against a rejection of a business methods patent, and the appeals court has now agreed with the rejection. At issue was whether an abstract idea could be eligible for patent protection. The court says no.

Buh-bye business methods patents!

Court Reverses Position on Biz Methods Patents

The ruling in the case, called In re Bilski, largely disavowed the controversial State Street Bank case of 1998. There, the Federal Circuit opened the door to business method patents, which had until then been excluded from patent protection, by granting protection to a system for managing mutual fund accounts. The decision, according to its detractors — which included several members of the Supreme Court — had led to the issuance of weak patents and exposed financial services companies to high-dollar litigation over business method patents.