Brent Kearney

Feeling tired or sleepy during the day? Nubella has published Five Ways to Boost Your Energy. They are:

1. Drink half your body weight in pounds, in ounces of water, per day. So if you weigh 180lbs (82kg), you should drink about 90oz (2.7L) of water per day. This does not include juice, soda, coffee or tea — just water. Water helps many bodily functions, and you will feel better if you drink enough of it.

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I woke up this morning to about 10cm of snow outside. It was glorious! The ski season approaches. To celebrate, I ran two laps on Tunnel Mountain, taking in the heavier snowfall at slightly higher altitudes, and getting totally soaked :).

Rumour has it that Lake Louise will open on November 10th this year. Last year, ski-patrollors were in the back bowls by mid-October. This year, I intend to join them!

Although the September snowfall is encouraging, it often happens for a brief period this time of year. Indeed, the forecast for next week is sunny. With the lower temperatures, particularly at night, with any luck, the snow will remain in the alpine.

St. Lucie County, Florida, USA, has a plan to solve two problems with one solution. The problems are waste disposal and energy production, and the solution is to disintegrate trash using plasma arcs, and cultivate the gas to turn turbines. There will be emissions from the process, but the emissions are supposedly far less than conventional power plants, like natural gas. Given that it also eliminates trash, the emissions are probably acceptable. This process is also known as Plasma Gasification.

According to the USA Today article, the plasma facility will vaporize 3,000 tons of trash per day, and produce 120 megawatts of electricity (per day? per month? they don’t say) that can be contributed to the power grid. The plant itself will use 1/3 of the power that it produces, so once started, it is self-sustaining.

Aside from gas emissions, the plant will also produce 600 tons per day of a rock-like material called slag, which they plan to sell as a cheap material to be used in road construction. I wonder if the slag will have some environmental toxicity…

The company behind the project is Geoplasma LLC, of Atlanta, Georgia. They are funding the entire $450 million project themselves, and expect it to pay for itself over 20 years.

Although there are questions about the environmental impact of trash-gas and trash-slag, this technology seems like a great idea for reducing the amount of waste in landfill sites, and for producing electricity. An even better solution to the landfill problem would be to force manufacturers to use less packaging materials — 4.5 lbs of garbage per person per day is a crazy amount of garbage. In addition to reducing the amount of packaging materials that are used, we should enact legislation to force manufacturers to use biodegradable materials. Anyways, a very good application of plasma technology would be in sewage disposal. Instead of dumping our sewage into the ocean, it could be sent to a plasma facility and converted into electricity. Sewage would probably produce a lot less “slag” than trash, and given that it is organic, its gas emissions would probably be less toxic as well.

The Apple’s Safari web browser has a few tricks up its sleeve that some people don’t take advantage of. For example, highlight any word (double-click it) and right click on it (or CTRL-click for you one-button mousers) to bring up a simple menu with four useful operations that you can do on that word:

Another nifty feature is the built-in spell checking for web forms — this is actually an OSX “cocoa” feature, so its present in almost all applications. If spell checking is enabled in an application, your misspelled words are underlined in red. Right clicking on those words shows some suggested alternatives that you can choose.

In web text-box areas, you can spell check the entire area, or enable check-as-you-go by right-clicking in the text area, and selecting your desired option from the Spelling menu. This is very handy for doing blog posts!

Today an article in Gizmodo taught me something new: you can look up a word in the dictionary simply by holding the mouse over it and holding down CTRL-Apple-D.

This works in any native (cocoa) Mac OSX application.

Another very useful feature of OSX is the ability to save an image of your desktop — also known as taking a screenshot — at any time by pressing Shift-Apple-3. Perhaps you want just a specific area of the desktop, like a certain image. Thats easy too: press Shift-Apple-4, then use the mouse to select the area of the screen that you’d like a screenshot of. You can save a specific window by pressing Shift-Apple-4-Space – a camera icon appears with which you can select the window to save. Screenshots are saved to PNG files on your desktop, and you can crop them or save them in a different image format using the built-in image viewing program, Preview.

I’m sure there are a lot of other little tricks that are built into OSX as well. If you know of some, I’d love to hear about them.

Rick Watson, MIS professor at the University of Georgia, is heading up an effort to create free text books for the developing world, using wiki technology. He has recruited about 80 academics, and with the recent press, he will likely get many more.

My first impression was great — wiki textbooks for developing countries! Now all they need is computers, electricity and Internet access, not to mention shelter, food and clean water. However, the plan is to print the textbooks that are created using wiki technology.

An interesting aspect of the story is the proposed solution to the problem of authoritative accuracy: new content that has not been editorially reviewed will appear in a different colour. Presumably such text will not be included in the print version. I like the idea, and its one that Wikipedia could consider adopting.

In fact, Wikipedia should take it a step further, and introduce an editorial control using peer voting. Sites like Digg.com exploit the power of the masses to vote on news stories — the most popular gets to be “front page” news. Similarly, Wiki editors could get votes for their authority on particular topics. A professor of physics, for example, would likely get more votes for his wiki contribution on the refraction of light through a prism, and a professor of social studies would get less votes for a contribution on the same article. Their contributions could be colour-coded according to their authority level.

Similarly, if a contributor has a high enough authority rating for a particular topic, they should be able to “sign off” on a contribution. Thus you would get a democratic editorial control mechanism. For example, suppose a student of physics starts the article on prisms with a couple of paragraphs. The contribution would be marked with some authority, but could be higher. Then a physics professor contributes and is voted to have very high authority. That professor is now allowed to mark the article as having passed editorial review.

Accounts on the wiki system would need to be taken more seriously for this to work. A more sophisticated identity verification system would need to be in place, at least for contributors who wish to be eligible for authority votes. Otherwise unscrupulous contributors could pretend to have credentials that they do not really possess.