[This is the remaining set of mental notes on the AGU conference, mostly as a mark for me to look up more later. Because it’s been a week two weeks, including a week of doing real work to ship products (w00t!), my recollection isn’t as good as it could be.]
He doesn’t bite. The first bloc of today’s presentations were about carbon capture and sequestration. Fascinating stuff. The first presenter, from the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, presented a “stabilization triangle” model. Carbon emissions in 2004 were estimated to be 7 gigatons/year. On the current path, it’s expected to be 14 Gt/y by 2055. Stabilizing output would
Lenny Bruce was not afraid Read More »
I sat in on only 11 sessions today, down from 24 yesterday and 21 on Monday. (The coolest thing was seeing work on modeling turbidity flow in Monterey Canyon. Mentioned in another session as an example of how boiling water can instantly freeze was this video.) Indeed, most of the day was spent wandering
The high-level observations for today: “Invited” speakers tend to be better than those that are… not invited. I do not have enough data on quality of uninvited talks, but I see an opportunity for a great practical joke. If the invited speaker isn’t working, you can either wait it out or go to the alternate
Love is like Nitrogen Read More »
As soon as I exited BART at the Powell Street stop, I remembered what else San Francisco is famous for: aggressive panhandling. In the two blocks to my hotel, I was hit up eight times. The hotel’s close, but my room is five floors above the edge of the street. All night I can hear
Let’s get geophysical Read More »
Dear Jonathan, Last month I installed the Java development kit so I could play at home. My dalliance with programming was fun. However, rolling out a beta for a major release soon demanded my full attention. I had forgotten about Java’s existence on my desktop until I happened to be doing some system cleanup. Oh,
Write once, install multiply redux Read More »
With my products’ release imminent, I spent last weekend coaxing Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ECC) into action. The ECC is appealing for a few reasons: It’s someone else’s high-throughput network – product distributions, especially with demo files, are in the hundreds of megabytes. The T1 at work is 1.4Mb/s. Sharing, firewalls, and proxies reduce my
While I was driving around Tucson, I was struck by how differently the traffic lights sequenced. (Phoenix didn’t seem to have the noticeable differences.) Consider this intersection of Some Boulevard and No Way: Some Boulevard is the moderately-trafficked arterial going left-right. In this intersection, left turns have to yield to oncoming traffic. The pedestrian crosswalk