Bus transit directions on iPhone 5

www.google.com/transit

This web page works great on the iPhone for finding bus times and routes just like you could on the old iPhone maps app using google maps. 

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From "Moments with Mark"

"What stops me in my tracks is realizing how little I control of God's plan
for my life, yet how important it is for me to be responsible for that which
I can control - choices."

Residential Swimming Pool Heating with Geothermal Heat Pump Systems

"A simple economic analysis showed that it would not be feasible to incorporate a swimming pool into a GHP system in northern U.S. climates due to the extra ground loop required. On the contrary, immediate savings could be realized in southern U.S. climates."

http://geoheat.oit.edu/bulletin/bull26-1/art4.pdf

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Geothermal Heat Pump Resource - Everything Geothermal - Home

http://www.geothermal-heat-pump-resource.org/

Win Compilation

Some incredible, or incredibly lucky (and foolish) feats.

Stress at work / Office stress COMPILATION!!!

Ever had a day like this? Tantrum city:

http://youtu.be/IzBy6agXKoA

Welcome to Foldit!!

This online game actually helps scientists figure out what shape a given protein sequence folds into. Players tweak the protein shape, while the server computes the overall energy of the chemical interactions in the entire protein, with the underlying assumption that a protein ends up in its lowest possible energy configuration.

http://youtu.be/lGYJyur4FUA

Ribosome kinetics and aa-tRNA competition determine rate and fidelity of peptide synthesis

As my daughter and I studied biology, we wondered how on earth a prokaryote cell can assemble a protein at a mind-boggling 20 amino acids per second. We wondered what the rate limiting step was. 
This paper discusses a mathematical model to prove that the rate-limiting factor when a ribosome is assembling a protein is the time it takes for a near-match amino acid to get shouldered out of the way by a correct-match amino acid in the chemical shuffle of building blocks arriving at the protein assembly site.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=cbmeviljoen

Irreducible complexity and evolution

An interesting treatise exploring how it could have been possible for random events in primordial evolutionary history to give rise to something as incredibly complex as protein synthesis via translation of a genetic code. 

"Indeed, the translation system might appear to be the epitome of irreducible complexity because, although some elaborations of this machinery could be readily explainable by incremental evolution, the emergence of the basic principle of translation is not. Indeed, we are unaware of translation being possible without the involvement of ribosomes, the complete sets of tRNA and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), and (at least, for translation to occur at a reasonable rate and accuracy) several translation factors. In other words, staggering complexity is inherent even in the minimally functional translation system. Thus, as outlined above, it appears that the evolutionary origin of translation is to be sought along the exaptation route, i.e., by retrodiction of the ancestral functions of various components of the translation system that would allow them to evolve functionalities enabling their recruitment for translation.

Even this, however, does not do the full justice to the difficulty of the problem. The origin of translation appears to be truly unique among all innovations in the history of life in that it involves the invention of a basic and highly non-trivial molecular-biological principle, the encoding of amino acid sequences in the sequences of nucleic acid bases via the triplet code[15,16]. This principle, although simple and elegant once implemented, is not immediately dictated by any known physics or chemistry (unlike, say, the Watson-Crick complementarity) and seems to be the utmost innovation of biological evolution."

http://www.biology-direct.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-2-14.pdf

Free Streaming Music Online in Canada

http://www.voltagenewmedia.com/general-web-design-seo/listen-to-free-streaming-music-in-canada/


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Dictionary

Word Origin & History for

"hidebound"

hidebound 1550s, from hide (n.1) + past tense of bind. Original reference is to emaciated cattle with skin sticking closely to backbones and ribs; metaphoric sense of "restricted by narrow attitudes" is first recorded c.1600.

http://m.dictionary.com/etymology/hidebound?linkId=8uxrdf

Youtube - a day in the life

Nicely edited vignettes of lives all around the world on a single day.

Car Crash - you get no warning!

Think about defensive driving for each of these scenarios - pretty hard to avoid some of them. Many of them caused by someone rushing to pass a slow vehicle or run a yellow light.

http://youtu.be/VeN7zJhtg60

Travel websites

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/10-travel-web-sites-worth-bookmarking/

Dishtip.com by single dish, not by restaurant
Skypicker.com figure out where you can fly within your budget
Stay.com listings of top attractions, museums, shopping, restaurants by destination
Staydu.com matches hosts from around the world with travelers
Vayama.com flight search engine that specializes in international routes 
Trivago.com compare many hotel sites at once
Matadornetwork.com free online travel community whose site contains treasure troves of articles
Seat61.com  tickets for any European train journey at the cheapest price
Triptuner.com use a panel of six sliders to “tune” your trip
Expatsblog.com/blogs

Crazy mountain bike skills

Danny McAskill
He's in the new movie Premium Rush. He's the only good part of it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1547234/

Pithy quotations

"Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment." ~ Rita Mae Brown
Many would be scantily clad if clothed in their humility. ~ Anon
Liberty is the right to discipline ourselves in order not to be disciplined by others ~ Clemenceau
He who is waiting for something to turn up might start with his own shirt sleeves.
You can't make anything idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious. ~ Ron Burns
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. ~ Edmunde Burke
"The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself." ~Rita Mae Brown
Write your plans in pencil but give God the eraser. ~ Anon
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. -C.S. Lewis
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."~Bernard Baruch




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Delightful free book

This book's a free download at iTunes, and makes for great bedtime reading for kids.
The charming verse is perfectly matched by the delightful drawings.
Cautionary Verses by Hilaire Belloc.

Apple iphone patents and patent wars

"Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons."
"...many people argue that the nation's patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today's digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations...As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices."
"...Today, Nuance is a giant in voice recognition. Apple is the most valuable company in the world. And the iPhone is wrapped in thousands of patents that keep companies in numerous court battles."
"...The evolution of Apple into one of the industry's patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs...While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, "we're going to patent it all." "
"...Patents for software and some kinds of electronics, particularly smartphones, are now so problematic that they contribute to a so-called patent tax that adds as much as 20 percent to companies' research and development costs"

http://nyti.ms/TiZ748

"NYTimes: The Patent, Used as a Sword "




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BEST of Fail / Win Compilation 2012

2:43 the old tablecloth trick actually worked - watch what happens!!

http://youtu.be/aoV0D6wQeck

We Found a Free Smartphone

In our throwaway society, here's a dismantled cell phone interleaved into the pages of every issue of a magazine purely to provide a few moments of a moving picture advertisement, and live tweets.

http://youtu.be/FQm7k4riCoE

World's largest Rube Goldberg

Biggest rubegoldberg I've seen yet.

http://youtu.be/4MiYtvbK4JY

Molotov Cocktail in Slow Motion

Watch from 2:05 on.
http://youtu.be/lfvceHUBWnU

Wave-powered seawater desalination.

I wondered about using wave-action to power desalination at our cottage, because it's a readily available source of the huge power (pressures) needed to drive reverse osmosis to extract water from seawater. Here is a very scholarly examination of the power available from wave action versus the amount of evaporation that occurs in that climate. The numbers are staggering, and the sophistication of the calculations is intriguing.
...Along arid, sunny coastlines, an efficient wave-powered desalination plant could provide water to irrigate a strip of land 0.8 km wide if the waves are 1 m high, increasing to 5 km with waves 2 m high.
...[Potable water] availabilities below about 1700 m3/capita/y are generally considered to indicate water scarcity.
...Waves will generally be available where sea-water is desalinated. But the harnessing of wave energy is, as with other forms of renewable energy, expensive in terms of capital plant and the effort needed to develop the technology.
...Of the 173,000 TW of solar power arriving at the earth's atmosphere, 114,000 TW is absorbed in the atmosphere, oceans and the earth's surface. About 1200 TW [or 0.7% of total solar power] of this thermal energy is then converted into the kinetic energy of the wind. The shearing action of the wind on the surface of the ocean generates currents and waves, involving energy transfer at a rate of around 3 TW [or 0.02% of the total solar power].
...It is evident that wave energy is generally out-of- phase with water demand for irrigation...Between 100 and 200 days of storage are needed to eliminate the need for overcapacity due to seasonal mismatch.
...In Morocco, for example, wave-powered desalination could supply 16% of the shortfall, increasing to 64% in the case of Oman. Somalia is the only mainland nation of those studied where potential supply clearly exceeds the shortfall, by a factor of about 6...there are many arid ocean-facing regions belonging to countries that do not figure as being short of water at the level of national statistics.
...in the Canaries and the Maldives, where lack of rainfall tends to coincide with abundant wave resource
...suggest that the energy cost of desalinating water is equivalent to horizontal transport over 100's of km. ...vertical transport of water requires about 1000 times more energy than horizontal transport.
...Wave energy stands out from other types of renewable energy resource, not only in terms of the intensity of the primary resource, but also in terms of the conversion efficiencies actually and theoretically obtainable. For comparison, the efficiency of solar energy conversion is commonly held to be limited to 86.7%...Real devices can only approximate such ideal devices crudely and the record efficiency of photovoltaic conversion actually attained is 35% [22].
Similarly, wind energy converters are normally interpreted as being subject to the Betz momentum theory that places a limit of 59% on achievable efficiency, with real wind turbines achieving efficiencies up to about 50% [23].
In contrast, there appears to be no theoretical reason why wave energy converters cannot reach 100% efficiency in theory and wave tank devices yielding over 80% have been demonstrated in practice

http://www.desline.com/articoli/6390.pdf

Wave-powered seawater desalination.

Wave-powered seawater desalination.
I wondered about using wave-action to power desalination at our cottage, because it's a readily available source of the huge power (pressures) needed to drive reverse osmosis to extract water from seawater. Here is a very scholarly examination of the power available from wave action versus the amount of evaporation that occurs in that climate. The numbers are staggering, and the souks fixation of the calculations is intriguing.
...Along arid, sunny coastlines, an efficient wave-powered desalination plant could provide water to irrigate a strip of land 0.8 km wide if the waves are 1 m high, increasing to 5 km with waves 2 m high.
...[Potable water] availabilities below about 1700 m3/capita/y are generally considered to indicate water scarcity.
...Waves will generally be available where sea- water is desalinated. But the harnessing of wave energy is, as with other forms of renewable energy, expensive in terms of capital plant and the effort needed to develop the technology.
...Of the 173,000 TW of solar power arriving at the earth's atmosphere, 114,000 TW is absorbed in the atmosphere, oceans and the earth's surface. About 1200 TW of this thermal energy is then converted into the kinetic energy of the wind [10]. The shearing action of the wind on the surface of the ocean generates currents and waves, involving energy transfer at a rate of around 3 TW.
...It is evident that wave energy is generally out-of- phase with water demand for irrigation...Between 100 and 200 days of storage are needed to eliminate the need for overcapacity due to seasonal mismatch.
...In Morocco, for example, wave-powered desalina- tion could supply 16% of the shortfall, increasing to 64% in the case of Oman. Somalia is the only mainland nation of those studied where potential supply clearly exceeds the shortfall, by a factor of about 6...there are many arid ocean-facing regions belonging to countries that do not figure as being short of water at the level of national statistics.
...Canaries and the Maldives, where lack of rainfall tends to coincide with abundant wave resource
...suggest that the energy cost of desalinating water is equivalent to horizontal transport over 100's of km. ...vertical transport of water requires about 1000 times more energy than horizontal transport.
...Wave energy stands out from other types of renewable energy resource, not only in terms of the intensity of the primary resource, but also in terms of the conversion efficiencies actually and theoretically obtainable. For comparison, the effi- ciency of solar energy conversion is commonly held to be limited to 86.7%...Real devices can only approximate such ideal devices crudely and the record efficiency of photovoltaic conversion actually attained is 35% [22].
Similarly, wind energy converters are normally interpreted as being subject to the Betz momentum theory that places a limit of 59% on achievable efficiency, with real wind turbines achieving effi- ciencies up to about 50% [23].
In contrast, there appears to be no theoretical reason why wave energy converters cannot reach 100% efficiency in theory and wave tank devices yielding over 80% have been demon- strated in practice

http://www.desline.com/articoli/6390.pdf



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