Category: Uncategorized

Deepwater Horizon Incident, Gulf of Mexico As the nation’s leading scientific resource for oil spills, NOAA has been on the scene of the Deepwater Horizon spill from the start, providing coordinated scientific weather and biological response services to federal, state and local organizations. …

I just installed an extremely useful utility which was mentioned in a thread over at the excellent SevenForums.com site.  It allows you to change the default links which show up in the left sidebar in the Open and Save dialog windows.  By default, the left sidebar for Open and Save dialogs contains the following five…

I’ve managed to come up with some useful scripts using RRDtool to pull data out of round-robin archives (rra’s) and to compute 95th percentile.  RRDtool is used as the database backend for multiple monitoring tools such as Cacti, Torrus, Zenoss, and MRTG (as option). In working this out I utilized the benefit of having my…

There is a big change coming to the Internet which has the potential to radically shift the nature of the Internet itself and how all of the nodes which participate in it collectively will be able to interact. If we were smart, we should be pushing for this change to occur, because the shift is…

I wonder how many millions of open-source developers’ and administrators’ unconscious minds have negative associations with sourceforge.net because it never lets you just download a .tar.gz file directly? Download links always go to a stupid download page which, when you’re just trying to wget the file, is a major PITA. You have to break out…

I was just thinking of what fascinating areas the sociology and psychology of linguistics are.  This came to mind when thinking about idiomatic expressions and not just the implications but implicit assumptions that are made on the part of speakers regarding who is being communicated with. For example, when a native speaker of a tongue…

Windows 7 has a new feature called “libraries” which is basically a location in the file system where you can link different files and folders from different locations together into one place.  So for example if you have photos stored in different locations and on different drives, you can list these all together under one…

According to an article(1) that just appeared today on Alternet.org: Over 200 studies since the early 1980s have now documented that people living in societies where wealth has concentrated at the top of the economic ladder live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than people who live in societies that spread their wealth more evenly. The…

The last major freakout of the Earth environment, I have just read, was in 1816, which was called the “Year Without a Summer”. What happens during a period of unusually low solar output and then a string of massive volcanoes spewing hundreds of tons of dust into the atmosphere?  Read this article at Wikipedia. A…

An article in ScienceDaily.com discusses a new technology that involves using low-temperature plasma to disinfect decayed teeth instead of the current process of drilling.  This new process does not require mechanical/physical contact with the tooth! Article: Painless Plasma Jets Could Replace Dentist’s Drill