Hotter than ever

NASA reports 2010 hottest year on record so far
[Via Climate Progress]

Last month, NASA reported it was the hottest January-September on record. That followed a terrific analysis, “July 2010 — What Global Warming Looks Like,” which noted that 2010 is “likely” to be warmest year on record.

This month continues the trend of 2010 outpacing previous years, according to NASA:

It now seems pretty certain 2010 will outpace 1998, which currently ties for fourth hottest year in the NASA dataset (though it is technically described by NASA folks as tied for the second hottest year with 2005 and 2007).

Outpacing 2005, the hottest year on record, will be closer. In NASA’s surface-based dataset, we are unlikely to set the record monthly temperatures for the rest of this year; last month wasn’t close to the hottest October for NASA, though it was third warmest. We have entered a moderate to strong La Niña, which NOAA says is “expected to last at least through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2010-11.” That said, as you can see, the October anomaly (deviation from the 1951-1980 average) was higher than September, in spite of the La Niña.

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Hope the picture makes it If not the URL is <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/2010vs2005+1998.pdf>

Look how warm the Arctic temperatures are. If Siberia was not having a cold year, we would really be way up there.

Dealing with water is Kitsap County

Kitsap Co. thinking of water in a new way
[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily ]

Water is too precious to use it for transporting sediments, wastes and pollution into Puget Sound, the Kitsap County commissioners said when they passed their “Water as a Resource” policy in June of 2009. [More]

One thing they mention is putting small units onto people’s septic systems that results in almost clean water. We actually have one of these that uses a UV lamp to kill bacteria, etc. The water that enters the drain field is perfectly clear. While it is against the law now to reuse this water anything, it might be better to recapture this locally for use than to send it off into septic or sewer systems.

Understanding melting ice

How fast will world’s ice melt?
[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]

Scientists are collecting new data in the effort to answer one of the most urgent – and most widely debated – questions facing humanity: How fast is the world’s ice going to melt? Many now believe that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 – an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.

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A nice long article about the current science. An interesting aspect is that the satellites that could have helped researchers understand the changes better have not been replaced. Agencies during the Bush Admininstration removed key climate and space weather instruments from several satellites, resulting in data gaps of from 1 to 11 years.

The General Accounting Office Report stated “Until these capabilities are in place, the agencies will not be able to provide key environmental data that are important for sustaining climate and space weather measurements.[...]Without a strategy for continuing environmental measurements over the coming decades and a means for implementing it, agencies will continue to independently pursue their immediate priorities on an ad hoc basis, the economic benefits of a coordinated approach to investments in earth observation may be lost, and our nation’s ability to understand climate change may be limited. While federal agencies have taken steps to plan for continued space weather observations in the near-term, they lack a strategy for the long-term provision of space weather data.”

The Obama Administration has still not released any strategy, even though it received reports from NASA and NOAA last Fall. Without a longterm strategy, the collection of climate data will be left to the vagaries of political appointees and partisan politics. Meaning we will have even less understanding of things as more satellites fail.

Making bricklaying cool

by the bridge

Brick-road-laying machine
[Via Boing Boing]

Tiger-Stone makes this enormous, unlikely and quite marvellous road-laying machine that semi-automatically sets down neat sets of interlocking bricks, ready to be sealed with a light dusting of sand.

The machine consists of an angled plain that workers feed with paving stones or bricks. As the electric crawler inches forward along a sand base layer, the bricks are automatically packed together by gravity. A small telescoping forklift feeds the hopper, allowing the Tiger-Stone to lay out an impressive 400 meters of road day, and the span can be adjusted up to six meters wide. Here’s a stereophonic video of the machine in action.

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This looks like a nice device to accelerate brick laying for roads. what is cool is the ability to lay out the bricks like a sheet of paper, changing the pattern whenever they want.

Here is the video:

[Listening to: 25 Minutes To Go from the album "At Folsom Prison" by Johnny Cash]

Power to make you victorious in all you undertake sure was cheap in the 60s

DO YOU WANT POWER?
[Via Boing Boing]

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Today, power requires millions of dollars to achieve. My Inflation Calculator says that $2 in 1960 is worth $14.33 today. Talk about inflation. Instead of only being 7-time more expensive, power today is millions of times more expensive.

Those power-hungry plutocrats sure had it easy in the 60s.

Storing and losing scienctific data

by Andrew Maiman

Jaz drives, spiral notebooks, and SCSI: how we lose scientific data
[Via Ars Technica]

Let’s say you’ve got a nice, digitized version of some scientific data, and you’ve already made reasonable choices about how close to the raw data you want to get in what you preserve. Better yet, you’ve hounded your students often enough that they’ve placed it in a single format and provided all the annotations that are needed to make sense of the data. You’re all set to preserve it and share it with the rest of the scientific community. Except you aren’t, because doing so creates its own challenges.

Saving the digits

Once the data is digitized, the next step is saving it. And here, the same issues that everyone else faces—bit rot, obsolete media, incompatible data formats—cause problems for scientists as well. For large organizations like the LHC computing grids or a genome sequencing center, these issues are handled at an institutional level. But for most of the small research groups, backups and archiving are handled on an ad-hoc basis, and usually left up to whichever current member of the staff happens to be most computer literate; organizing the archiving and ensuring it was complete was left up to individual users.

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Finding ways to store large data sets has been a problem for many years. Especially since some type of experiments produce data up to the limits of current storage technology. A single genomic DNA sequencing run can generate terabytes of data. Not something you can carry around on a USB drive.

Storing scientific data for any length of time is fraught with many problems. Technology changes so fast and so does the storage schemes. With changing times, changing personnel and changing institutions it is very hard for data older than just a few years to remain easily accessible.

And that would be true even if there was money to pay for the storage, which there usually is not. And doing it right takes away from the ability of researchers to do research, which affects their grants, tenure and career.

It is hard to know how to fix this.

[Listening to: Young Without Lovers from the album "Life, Death, Love and Freedom" by John Mellencamp]

‘Leaked’ sales report for former iPad killer – 9000 units

by mauritsonline

Apple iPad rival HP Slate sees demand fizzle at 9,000 units
[Via AppleInsider]

After announcing that demand for its HP Slate had “exceeded expectations,” it has now leaked out that HP only planned to build 5,000 and ended up having to retool to build a total of 9,000 of them.

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This is from an anonymous source so it could well be wrong but the story of the Slate is a sorry one. It was wonderful vaporware when unveiled by Microsoft and HP earlier this year. They tried to steal the iPad’s thunder. Looks like they failed. 9000 does not look good compared with the 46,000 iPads sold a day this last quarter. Another Windows tablet failure.

Remember the Courier tablet that MS was hawking earlier this year? Looks like the Slate will be joining it on the trash bin of history. Where many other tablets have gone.

Perhaps HP will do better with their own OS and own hardware, which may see the light of day sometime next year.

Will streaming everything be in Apple’s future?

Apple promises an unforgettable iTunes announcement coming Tuesday
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple has published a teaser on the front page of its website, telling customers that an “exciting announcement” regarding iTunes is coming at 7 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday.

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What? No big event in some conference center? Will Steve be there? TCould Steve be making the announcement via streaming video from their new data center?

I’ve talked before about Apple’s data center and how it might be a tactic not only to deal with music but with video, movies and telephony. Maybe we will get a better idea tomorrow.

Great video for a Monday morning

Early Morning Open Thread: Maru!
[Via Balloon Juice ]

Thanks to commentor Trollhattan for this temporary antidote to the mondays:

What really pulls the video together is Maru’s lashing tail… he knows it’s a cruel trick, that he’s being yanked around for our monkey entertainment. And yet, he can’t resist—it’s a BOX, after all!

Incidentally, the Spousal Unit tells me that “Maru” is the Japanese word for “round”.

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Sometimes, toys are just to seductive, even for cats. When the toys are differently shaped boxes, it is a time for a little chortling.