The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf

While researching Brian Wynne Garfield's body of work, I ran across this unusual web site.  I suppose it's not surprising that professionals read books related to their specialty, but I do find it amusing that the CIA would make the reading list public.

Stumbleupon

Stumpleupon.com, previously sold to eBay for $75 million, has been repurchased by its original owners for an undisclosed sum. See bits.blog.nytimes for details. I hope that it will regain the original promise that it showed.

If you are not familiar with stumpleupon, I highly recommend it.  It's free and, for the moment, ad free. You sign up with a short questionnaire covering your interests. It then guides you into stumbling upon Internet sites that appeal to you. Thereafter you can rate each site with thumbs up or down to improve the accuracy of your future finds.

Take a look and report back on the most interesting pages that you stumble upon.

Al Gore Admits Ethanol Bill Was An Error

Energy: Former Vice President Al Gore admitted Monday that his pivotal 1994 Senate vote for ethanol subsidies was bad policy but good politics. That says a lot about the reality of environmentalism in government.
As the ethanol tax credit comes up for renewal in Congress on Dec. 31, it's worth noting it only came about because the vice president cast the decisive 51st vote in favor of it in 1994.
At the time, he packaged it as a big move to preserve the environment in a market-friendly, sustainable manner, and for years defended his vote because it was supposedly good for us.
"The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be," he recounted in 1998.
Now the real story emerges. On Monday he matter-of-factly told a bankers group in Greece it was actually about helping himself.
"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president," the former vice president said.

See the original article for the estimates of what this has cost taxpayers and people who depend on corn for nourishment.

Phosphates in Detergents

Well, I've had it with the eco-terrorists.  As of July there are enough states that outlaw phosphates in detergents that all national brands of detergent have switched to phosphate-free (<0.5%) formulations. And the feds have proposed that the ban become nationwide.  In other words, dish washing detergent is now useless.  There are other solutions in the clothes washer, like pre-wash sprays and borax, that mitigate the problem. But dish washers are no longer functional. Glassware comes out with lip prints on the rims. I'm not talking about lipstick, though I doubt that comes off either.  It doesn't even remove dried saliva!  And stainless steel flatware comes out stained.

New York has gone so far as to ban phosphorus in lawn fertilizer by 2012!  No more flowers or healthy root systems.  13-0-13 doesn't seem to cut it.

This is ludicrous. It won't work, simply because there is no ban on trisodium phosphate (TSP.)  But beware, I have seen a product in hardware stores with the brand name TSP that contains no phosphates! 

So you can add your own TSP (~$3.50 a pound) and use the cheapest store-brand detergent as a bonus.  It should work better than anything else you can buy. I hope those who chose to add their own phosphates do it wisely. TSP is 20% phosphorus by weight. No more than 9% phosphorus, please.  If my math is correct, that means no more than one part TSP to two parts phosphorous-free detergent.  But check the label on your TSP and adjust accordingly.  Not all real trisodium phosphate products are 100% trisodium phosphate.

Update 18 November:

After some experimentation, I discovered that the film on my dishes was primarily CaCO3 - hard-water deposits.  The older detergents seemed to have kept it at bay. I tried white vinegar in the wash water, but it didn't do much. I finally resorted to Lime Away, a gel containing HCl.  Hand washing with it cleaned up my dishes, glassware, and flatware nicely.  Next I bought some Seventh Generation dishwasher cleaner to remove the old calcium deposits and finally some Lemi-Shine and Savogran TSP.  The Savogram is not completely soluble.  It tends to leave a powder on the dishes if used in the main wash, but it takes very little of it. My final solution was Lemmi-Shine in the soap dispenser and one-quarter TSP and three-quarters cheap dishwasher detergent in the pre-wash cup.  I'm also using Cascade Rinse Aid in the rinse dispenser, but I'm not sure it's contributing much.

Sparkling clean dishes. I may also experiment with borax and baking soda.

Sunday web surfing and amazon.com

My favorite Sunday pastime is web surfing.  It seems no matter where I start, I end up at Amazon.com.

Today it started half way through watching CBS Sunday Morning when Osgood ran a 20-minute piece on Steig Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy.  I paused the TiVo and went to the web to read more about his relationship with Eva Gabrielsson, his domestic partner.  There I saw a comment that he was the second best selling author in the world, after Khaled Hosseini, who I was forced to look up.  Ah yes, The Kite Runner.  Now I know who he is. Turns out he does have a new novel called A Thousand Splendid Suns released in October, 2010.

Next stop was the Best Seller List in the New York Times.  It occurred to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, so I looked for him (in vain.)  The list has nine categories, all self-explanatory except the last which is called "Graphic Books."

Graphic Books appear to be highly illustrated books that don't fit well under children's books, like the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  His second book, The Marvelous Land Of Oz, is on the best selling graphic books list. That thought that odd; he's dead. So I went Wikipedia and sure enough, he died in 1919. But I did discover that it was the second book in his ten-book canonRuth Plumly Thompson who wrote 19 Oz books, all considered to be in the canon. about Oz.  There I learned about

By this time I needed a better definition of canon, so I Googled "define literary canon"  which lead me to Protocanon and ultimately to Deuterocanon, and Apocrypha.  Aha!  I had never thought of the connection between literary canon and canonization of saints. Makes perfect sense.  Along the way, I ran into the term Septuagint, or LXX. That same Protocanon Wikipedia article has a nice to know piece of trivia regarding why the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is called LXX.  (No mention of why it was called LXX instead of the Greek number οϝʹ, but I had digressed enough by then and didn't try to find out.)  But there was an interesting bit of trivia associated with LXX.

"King Ptolomy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher. 'God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.'"

Well, I guess LXX means 70-ish.  Still, I had to ask about which Ptolemy.  Turns out he was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE and the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom.  Hmm, and who was Cleopatra's (and Antony's) son?  He turns out to be Ptolemy Philadelphus, too, named after his distant, but not direct, ancestor.

At this point I had about five browser tabs open that I had yet to visit.  You've Won The Nobel Prize -- Wait, Don't Hang Up! and a bunch of Amazon.com links.  One was to The Marvelous Land of Oz.  Turns out that this is the 100th anniversary of the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Reading the customer reviews, I saw " I just finished reading this one, a chapter each night, to my preschool age son. He loved it." So I put it on my wish list as a reminder to get the first two books for my granddaughter when she is five or six.

The other Amazon tabs?  One was The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Sorry, I don't agree with Mr. Harris that scientifically determined values can replace religion.  Improve it, perhaps, but for my money, I like the threat of eternal damnation. Maybe it doesn't affect me, but there are a lot of folks out there who need better self-control.

Why do I always end up at Amazon?  Probably because that's where the ultimate references still point.  The web has not replaced books, but it has made them more accessible in a variety of formats, including immediate download.  So why is the publishing business declining?  Turns out that the decline is in advertiser-supported publications.  The book publishing business seems to be thriving despite the new costs of converting to digital equipment. 

The Electric Sky

Surfing the web, I ran across The Electric Sky by Donald E. Scott.  It is a fresh breeze in cosmology and astrophysics.  Dr. Scott is an electrical engineer who thinks that physical scientists have gone astray with their theories of galactic and solar theory.  The key word is plasma.  Many astrophysicists ignore the existence of plasmas in space.  Dr. Scott thinks this is a serious problem.

Before the space program it was assumed that space was empty.  Space probes have shown that not to be the case.  Space is full of plasmas, fields of atoms in random shapes.  The technical definition is that a plasma is a fourth state of matter distinct from solid or liquid or gas and present in stars and fusion reactors; a gas becomes a plasma when it is heated until the atoms lose all their electrons, leaving a highly electrified collection of nuclei and free electrons. "Particles in space exist in the form of a plasma."

From Amazon.com's review of the book: "A Challenge to the Myths of Modern Astronomy. It is clear that electric plasma research affords simpler, more elegant, and more compelling insights and explanations of most cosmological phenomena than those that are now espoused in astrophysics. This book contains astronomical science for the expert written for the public."

At the heart of it, Scott is saying that astrophysics has lost its way.  They are inventing many, many particles (dark matter, dark energy) and ideas (like black holes) that cannot be seen or measured to explain elements of atomic and galactic theory when a far simpler explanation exists. His most amazing conclusion (in my opinion) is that the sun is not driven by fusion reactions.  The sun gets its energy from the electrical power in the Milky Way. The fusion reactions near the sun's surface are incidental to the overall power of the sun.  There is also some suggestion that the Big Bang never happened.

We know that Newtonian physics cannot explain the universe.  Newtonian gravitational theory does not explain the shape of galaxies. Gravity is simply too weak to contain a galaxy.  Furthermore, the motion of galaxies makes no sense.  Stars in the outer limbs of the galaxy should be moving faster then those closer to the center. But they don't.  They move at the same rate.

Scott shows over and over that the only explanation for what we observe is electromagnetic phenomena, not gravity,

I recommend this book to anyone who wants an educated layman's view of the controversy.

Hard Drives

An incipient hard drive failure recently forced me to go shopping for a bare drive for the first time in about six years.  The fact that I saw it coming is miracle enough.  Windows XP actually warned me each time I rebooted that the boot drive would soon fail and I should back it up immediately. Well, I had a spare, even larger 250 GB drive, but it took me a week to get the proper software  I settled on Acronis True Image because it gets better reviews than Ghost.  A few hours after the backup, the boot drive failed. The symptom was one I had never experienced. The boot drive was master and the clone drive was slave. When the master failed, Windows couldn't switch to the slave because the master controller was what failed.  So I disconnected the bad drive and replugged the clone as master.  I had forgotten the F2 trick to open BIOS setup, but the True Image CD came to the rescue. It has a clickable link that says "Boot Windows."  So at least I could surf the web to find the F2 trick and fix the BIOS..

Anyway, now I needed a spare drive. The previous one had been spinning alongside the failed drive since I bought the desktop in 2004.  Best to assume it is doomed to fail before long.

Drives have changed a lot in six years!  The old style interface, ATA/ATAPI (aka IDE or parallel ATA) is hard to find and prices are rising.  The new standard is the cheaper SATA (serial ATA.)  On top of that, my "old" PC has the almost as old PCI bus on the motherboard.  Big decision: buy old technology or new?  Web surfing to the rescue!

It turns out that even after buying new signal and power cables (of course SATA had to be different!) and buying a PCI version of the SATA controller, it was a break-even deal to go with the new technology.  A 500 GB SATA drive goes for an amazing $41.00 to $45.00.  There are cheaper ways than a new controller, but adapters cost just a few dollars less and you can only attach one SATA drive to it. That's a nice solution for a TiVo upgrade, but I had to assume I would need a second SATA drive soon. My new controller can accept two SATA internal drives or one internal and one external.

It had been a long time since I looked at the technology, but a few hours on the web brought me up to speed.  Still, rather than order on line, I decided to call Tiger Direct and get them to validate my choices.  Good move.  I had missed the fact that it needed a power cable adapter.

The drive, controller, and cables are due here in two days. I feel comfortable that it will go well.  Frankly, the worst part of the install is likely to be getting the failed drive out of the case. It's already disconnected, but the screws holding it in require a 90-degree Phillips screwdriver.

As for Tiger Direct, more news there.  They now charge Texas state sales tax.  Seems they have a hookup with one CompUSA store in the Dallas area and are opening a TigerDirect store near it.