Solar Storms

In 1859, a solar flare so powerful that it allowed the telegraph operators of the day to draw power down from the atmosphere to power their machines, smacked into earth.

“We observed the influence upon the lines at the time of commencing business — 8 o’clock — and it continued so strong up to 9 1/2 as to prevent any business from being done, excepting by throwing off the batteries at each end of the line and working by the atmospheric current entirely!” the astonished telegraph operators of Boston wrote in a statement that appeared in The New York Times later that week.

The Boston operator told his Portland, Maine counterpart, “Mine is also disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?” Portland responded, “Better than with our batteries on,” before finally concluding with Yankee pluck, “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”

My guess is that if this were to happen today, we wouldn’t be able to just “go ahead with business” for quite some time.   More from Wired

Big Ballon Balloon

Keeping with the large-scale disaster theme (I meant the the Texas City post, but I’m certain the last post on the Lege could also apply), yesterday was the 72nd anniversary of the destruction of the Hindenburg.

It was 72 years ago today that the Hindenburg caught fire, resulting in the deaths of 36 people (35 onboard and one on the ground). So why did it catch fire in the first place? Nearly three-quarters of a century later, we still don’t know.

Netorama runs down the plausible theories.

Playing for Change


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Germ gets all the credit for this one – The Playing for Change Project. These guys have traveled the world recording different street musicians and then mixing it together as one track.

Rethinking the Grid

One of the biggest single dollar items in the stimulus package is rethinking the way we deliver energy. According to my uncle, who works on these kind of things, for the most part the electric meter you find on the side of your house is almost identical to the ones you would have found in the late 19th century. He also credits the modern American electric grad as one of the greatest infrastructure achievements of the last century. However, these days the system is in trouble because of (surprise) Congress.

In 1978, Congress began chipping away at the utilities’ dominance by forcing them to buy electricity from independent generation companies that met efficiency goals. Fourteen years later, the government went much further, ordering the utilities to open their transmission lines to all comers.

The result was utter chaos. Many utilities got out of the generation business and morphed into middlemen, shopping for the cheapest power—often from areas with low labor costs and lax environmental oversight—and transporting it hundreds, even thousands, of miles to their customers. This meant using the links between grids, which hadn’t been designed to accommodate such heavy traffic. The grids of distant states thus became closely intertwined, so that an outage in one rural county could affect millions of far-flung customers.

Essentially, no matter how many wind turbines Boone Pickens builds in west Texas, we’re still going to have to figure out a better way to get it to the more populous areas. More about what we can do to modernize the system, including some really interesting power storage technologies like massive fly wheels.

Google goes VC

Google is jumping into the venture capitol game, with Google Ventures (they were probably already there before, but this is new to me)  –

Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies – we believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. We’re studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care. We invest anywhere from seed to mezzanine stage and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.

What’s interesting is not the money, or the absurdly simplistic website, but the broad range of fields they’re covering.

Sterling

Bruce Sterling’s ‘State of the World’ address is always a bit of a trip. Here are some choice selections culled from my notes and the twit-blogos-book-sphere-thingy.

The eurpoeanization of America would be a best case scenario. Worst case would be the Argentinaization of America.

We got more going on than we think. We could do a few things to create a 21st century we could be proud of.

The elderly are going to be the backbone of a noncommercial social web….they’re not too weak to push enter…

Its bad thing to get practical political advice from a science fiction writer – leaves you open to mocking counterattack.

Hanging out in places like Sarajevo, you realize this potluck supper thing becomes the cement of the universe.

Why should i keep up authorly appearances in front of the people formerly known as ‘the audience’?
(he proceeded to crack open a shiner at the lectern at this point).

The Kindle is like a plug-in cassette for an Atari 400. None of the 25 year olds here will be reading it when they’re my age.

The reason we’re not clawing at each other in the face of global struggles is that we have connected via social media.

The poorest people on the planet are densely connected…Poor people love cell phones. They are getting cataclysmatically cheap in what was used to be known as the third world.

And that’s just the tip of the mildly insane-iceberg.

Geek Classes

Some basic breakdowns of the attendees of South by Southwest Interactive. Please keep in mind that most of the folks here seem pretty awesome – but few rotten apples can really screw up your pie eating experience.

The Elites
You are the rye crisp of the bold party flavor chex mix – colorful and shocking, but by and large unnecessary. Your computer is either a Macbook Air, or a Moleskin notebook, (because you just need to separate yourself from technology for a while, man). Most likely you”re sporting a fedora, that covers up a faux-hawk and ironic, yet unnecessary glasses. Your phone is either the iPhone or the new Android phone, because even though your paper journal is analog-hip, how will you update your twitter status with it. You always leave every session early, because, lets face it,  you’ve already heard everything the presenters had to say at a conference in NYC  earlier this year (and if the rest of us don’t know which one you’re referring to we probably aren’t worthy).

Ubergeek
You appear to have come to Austin carrying the backpack of an Appalachian Trail hiker, filled to the brim with everything you could possibly need to survive sxsw  or a zombie siege in the convention center. You’d like to go out and grab a beer with friends, but you’ve been to busy uploading a live video stream of your lunch to actually leave the building (you have a sleeping bag a cot in your gianourmous backpack so you can camp next to the routers for maximum bit-rates). You’re probably hauling around two computers, one of which is running several varietals of linux, but none of which can actually seem to connect to the convention center wifi reliably (but hey, even if it doesn’t work, at least you’re supporting open source).

Plain old dude/dudette
This is the bulk of people here. You are the pretzel of the mix – not terribly exciting, but a cornerstone ingredient. You are easily identified by the fact that you’re probably not dressed completely in black. You’re probably a local, who just came here to learn what’s up & coming in your field, but you’re probably  little put off by all the out by all the out-of-towners talking about how awesome the margarita’s at chuy’s are (they’re not), and how warm the weather is (it’s not) even if it is a little cloudy. By and large your sporting whatever computer your company’s given you, or the old Ibook, that despite the odds is still kickin. You are sporting the iPhone, but  contrary to everyone elses behavior of posting every bodily function to twitter with a #sxsw tag attached  you might actually keep your phone in your pocket and  try talking to people in line or those sitting next to you in the session. You may also be randomly over come with urge to smite the ironic head ware of you fellow conference attendees (Dude with the chinchilla-cat-in-the-hat, I’m talking to you.)

SXSWi

photo-1There’s not many conferences, specifically internet ones, where you can go from one panel with a Canadian in paisley silk smoking jacket reading Thoreau (complete with pipe) to a presentation on Making Yourself Interesting where one of the powerpoint slides is simply “Do Epic Shit” in 500 pt type.

The trend of  asking questions through Twitter is pretty cool as well – tag your tweet (I do really hate that term)  with a hash tag (#roux in this panel’s case) and the moderator (and the rest of the audience via Twitter search) can see your question an pose it to the panel. Wacky.

Geekness alert

I hope this doesn’t shock anybody with how nerdy i actually am, but holy hell this looks like it’s going to be pretty kick ass (as long as J.J. Abrahms  doesn’t put Kirk and co on a time traveling island).

Obama Burger

obama-burger

From the intrepid Brian J. Pinero, esquire – currently on the ground in D.C. Apparently the entire place cheers every time one is ordered.