Books: Above Suspicion

Above Suspicion by Lynda La Plante

by Lynda La Plante. An English murder mystery, very much like the stories they show on the PBS series "Mystery" where they have paired the dashing older male detective with the younger, new on the job female detective. Set in London, and surprise, surprise, it is about a serial killer. It formed a coherent story, it was well put together and very smooth. I was able to read it for an hour at a time, and would only stop because I needed a break, not because of a glitch in the story. There were a couple of glitches, but they were understandable, because there was a lot going on in the story and it was plausible that these items could have been temporarily overlooked. And it was quickly apparent that someone had caught on to these lapses and was going to follow up on them. Not a great story, but good enough. The only thing I wondered about was the female lead's emotional reactions. Would someone really be that affected by the people she was dealing with? Did the author include this to try and make some connection with her female readers? Are women really like that? Or maybe I am just older and not so susceptible to such flights of fancy. Was I when I was younger? Bit hard to tell really.

Looking on the net I found this is a very popular title. There are at least four different movies with this title, and at least four different books.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Books: The Aviator

by Ernest K. Gann. A slim volume, only 148 pages. Didn't take long to read it. The ever ubiquitous "they" made a movie of it with the same name back in 1985 starring Christopher Reeve. This is not the movie of the same name made in 2004 that starred Leonardo de Capria as Howard Hughes. This story is about early aviation, flying the mail over the Western United States, crash landing with a little girl passenger in the mountains and surviving. But like all good stories, it is more about the people involved and what's going on in their minds. Some of the details of the story don't hang together perfectly, but it could have happened that way, truth being stranger than fiction.

The regularly scheduled mail flight is from Elko in North Central Nevada to Pasco in Southeast Washington. This is high desert and pretty desolate. The Black Rock desert, scene of all kinds of craziness, is in this neighborhood.

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Pain In The Neck, Part 3

I finally figured out that it was the way my computer was set up that was causing all the problems. I had the monitor set on the left side of my desk to leave the center clear for papers. When I was only using it for a few hours a week it was tolerable, but when I started using it several hours a day is when it became a problem. So while my posture may not be too good, it wasn't 30 years of sitting in front of a computer that screwed me up, it was a year of reaching for the keyboard because the desk pedestal was in the way of my knees. So there is some hope I will recover from this in relatively short order.

Since I needed to move the monitor, I thought I would use this opportunity to try out the 19" LCD that I liberated from my daughter since she got her new go-to-college-toy (Mac Laptop). I spent about 20 minutes futzing with it and though it looks pretty good, I am not sure I am happy with it. When it was connected to daughter's machine (a virtual clone of my Dell), it looked pretty terrible. There was a shadow under the mouse pointer that would not go away. I now suspect that it may have been a "special effect" enabled by a check box somewhere. Text also looked terrible as it did when I hooked it up to my machine, but I don't have the pointer shadow.

I spent the better part of an hour surfing the web looking for advice on how to make an LCD display look decent. You wouldn't believe how much useless non-information there is out there on this subject. I finally found one site that spelled it out pretty clearly. Set the display resolution to the same as the native resolution of the display. Set the DPI setting to 120 and turn on Clear Type. I also turned down the contrast and the brightness using the controls on the display itself.

Okay, but what's the native resolution of the display? Well, it has five chrome buttons below the screen. The one in the middle is bigger and there is a green light above it. Think that might be the power switch? The two to the right have triangles on them, one pointing up, one pointing down. The ones on the left, well, they have squiggles on them. Some judicious poking brings up a menu and the native resolution: 1280 x 1024. These two buttons are supposed to number one and number two, and now that I know what they are supposed to say I can sort of make out the numbers. But then I am old.

The display is much better now. I can read the greyed out entries in the Windows menus that I could not see at all before I started futzing with this thing. I am still not sure I like this display better than the CRT. It still looks a little odd. Things look a little blurry, but they aren't. I imagine it is some trick of my eyes trying to read stuff on this LCD screen.

Update November 2016 replaced missing picture.

Vision

Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation and as such, forms a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. A chart of the electromagnetic spectrum labels types of radiation with their corresponding frequency and/or wavelength. If you look at such a chart you may observe that visible light forms a very small part of the spectrum. This is often remarked upon, but I have never heard any explanation as to why that might be. But this evening as I was out for my daily constitutional, I thought of a reason. Lower frequency radiation is more vague, it behaves more like a wave. It spreads out in all directions from it's source and flows around obstacles in its' path. Light is the lowest frequency radiation that travels in straight lines and does not exhibit this flowing characteristic. This means that visible light will reveal the precise direction of its' source. Radiation at lower frequencies will give you a vague idea of the location of the source. The lower the frequency, the vaguer the location. Infrared radiation, which is just below visible light on frequency spectrum, can be seen by some instruments, but the pictures they produce are a little fuzzy. This could be a limitation of the instruments, but I suspect it is more because of the nature of infrared radiation.

Radiation above that of visible light (ultra violet) and above is too energetic. It takes too much energy to produce and when it impacts living tissue it can cause damage. We survive because there is not too much of it around.

So the fact that we can see is a fluke of nature. Visible light is energetic enough to travel in straight lines and not flow around objects, and it is of low enough energy for it to be produced in enough quantity that being able to detect it is worthwhile.

Note that the frequency times the wavelength is equal to the speed of light, which is very nearly 300,000 kilometers per second, or 3 x 10^5 km/s. The wavelength in the chart below is given in meters. The speed of light in meters per second is 3 x 10^8. You can multiply the values show in the chart below by adding the exponents. Note that this chart uses a logarithmic scale and is only an approximation of the spectrum. For more detailed information, you might want to try Wikipedia.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

Price of Oil

I have been enjoying the reduction in traffic since gas prices have gotten so high, but I was reading some flapper doodle on the net today and it got me to thinking. Why have gas prices gone up so much? Because the price of oil has gone up, silly. But why has the price of oil shot up so much so fast? Is it because demand has gone up so much, or is it that demand is running just a little ahead of supply? According to Aramco World, Saudi Arabia is the one country that can easily increase production to meet increased demand. Could it be that they are holding down production to force prices higher? Why would they do that? Well, more money in their pocket, and more money in every other oil producing nations pocket as well. I mean that was the whole point of OPEC in the beginning. Now Saudi Arabia is supposedly an ally of the United States. We sell them boatloads of military hardware, and they send back a portion of the money we send them for oil. The current administration is a friend to big business, so I would not be surprised if good ol' Dubya asked them to hold down production to push up prices, so his buddies in the oil business could make a few quick bucks before Dubya loses his kingly position. I supposed the Saudi's could have done this on their own, but that wouldn't make much of a conspiracy theory would it? And then what would we talk about?

Books: The Draco Tavern

The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven

by Larry Niven. Science Fiction - Short Stories. Larry Niven was required reading in my basic astronomy class back in school, many years ago. Many of his stories featured unusual stellar objects, and his stories made use of some of their properties. It added some life to what could have been some very dry subject matter.

This book uses the tavern and its' patrons as props for some philosophical speculations on things like the nature of knowledge, how much you can know, have there been any civilizations here before us? Most of the characters are aliens and pretty sketchily drawn. If you don't get bogged down in the philosophy, it's pretty light reading. I finished it in a day.

He does make some attempt to make the aliens alien. They come in different sizes, in different constructions, use different atmospheres, speak different languages. Some of them even live on a different time scale. There was one alien that took two years to come through the door. But they were all able to communicate (using the universal translator).

I sometimes wonder if we will ever meet any intelligent alien life. I also wonder if we would be able to recognize it if we did come across some. Shoot, we may have some sort of alien life here on earth right now that we don't even know about, and they might not even recognize us as intelligent life forms.


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All this makes me wonder about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). They are listening for radio signals. But how powerful a radio would you need to be heard 100 light years away? In all directions? If somebody out there was listening, would they even be able to hear us? And what if their transmission methods are far more efficient than ours? Do we have the technology, or even the knowledge to recognize a signal? Much of our current radio transmission technology revolves around being undetectable, and we have only been doing this for 100 years. What are we going to be doing with electromagnetic radiation in another 100 years? I guess it doesn't hurt to listen, but I wonder if anyone is going to want to foot the power bill for a radio that can be heard on Alpha Centauri.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture, autofix map html.

PPT: Parts Per Trillion

Our local water department sent out a big full color brochure this week talking about what they were doing and what all was involved in delivering water.

One of the things they are looking at is detecting chemicals with a presence in the range of parts per trillion.

Seems like I heard something once that said there were about a trillion atoms in a cell in a human body, a trillion cells in a human body, and a trillion stars in the galaxy. It may not have been a trillion, it may have been more or less, but the idea was these numbers were all on the same order of magnitude.

The brochure gave some examples of what one part per trillion would look like, but I didn't particularly like any of them, so I worked up a little spreadsheet to try and generate my own example. One part per trillion is like one teaspoon of your mystery substance in square field two and a half miles on a side flooded with water to a depth of one foot. I suppose the question now is how many molecules are in that teaspoon?