When checking in at the terminal, Lufthansa passengers' fingers are scanned and their fingerprints printed in encrypted form as a barcode on the boarding pass. During boarding, the code on the pass is then checked against the actual fingerprint to identify the passenger...I don't understand the move towards biometrics, and I strenuously object to the use of RFID chips, especially when linked with biometrics. However, Lufthansa's approach here seems sound, if only we could be guaranteed that our encrypted fingerprints wouldn't be stored, cross-referenced and checked against any number of other databases. Which, of course, is exactly what will happen...
Friday, July 08, 2005
Biometric boarding passes?
According to Forbes (via Engadget) Lufthansa has started testing biometric boarding passes.
The new dark age?
Jonathan Huebner is predicting an upcoming dark age. He claims that the rate of technological progress, rather than exponentially increasing, is actually slowing, and has been since the late 19th century.
I don't believe I've ever seen an article I disagree with more, his choice of metrics is dubious, and his conclusions are questionable...
Huebner bases his conclusions on his analysis of major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, this seems to me to be a odd metric to choose. The world population has been steadily growing but as anyone that has ever managed a project can tell you, throwing more people at a problem will not necessarily mean that it gets solved faster. So why does he normalise against world population? Doing this is so obviously the wrong thing to do...
Huebner says,
While it is certainly true that in general you shouldn't necessarily extrapolate exponential growth curves towards a technological singularity, as many people have done in the past, I think such a singularity is more likely that a new dark age. Every year it is harder and harder to keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, even for those of us deeply involved with it. Anyone working in the high technology will tell you that Huebner's conclusions are bogus...
I don't believe I've ever seen an article I disagree with more, his choice of metrics is dubious, and his conclusions are questionable...
Huebner bases his conclusions on his analysis of major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, this seems to me to be a odd metric to choose. The world population has been steadily growing but as anyone that has ever managed a project can tell you, throwing more people at a problem will not necessarily mean that it gets solved faster. So why does he normalise against world population? Doing this is so obviously the wrong thing to do...
Huebner says,
We are approaching the 'dark ages point', when the rate of innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages, we'll reach that in 2024.however does at least seem to realised that something is wrong with his conclusions, and contradicts himself a bit further down the article,
I'm certainly not predicting that the dark ages will reoccur in 2024, if at all...Extrapolation of Huebner's innovation curve it appears that we have already made 85 per cent of the technologies that are economically feasible. This seems like a far fetched conclusion to reach, even based on his analysis.
While it is certainly true that in general you shouldn't necessarily extrapolate exponential growth curves towards a technological singularity, as many people have done in the past, I think such a singularity is more likely that a new dark age. Every year it is harder and harder to keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, even for those of us deeply involved with it. Anyone working in the high technology will tell you that Huebner's conclusions are bogus...
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
In transit
I took the red eye out of Kailua-Kona last night and arrived into SFO at some stupidly early hour in the morning...
United 36 out of KOA bound for SFO
I must admit at this point to committing one of the cardinal sins of the frequent traveller, not reading the return itinerary particularly carefully. You tend to get a bit blasé about travelling after a while, and just figure things will work out...
In the past this has left me on La Palma scheduled for an inter-island flight which would get me into Tenerife North with only 40 minutes between landing and take off of my connecting flight at Tenerife South. For those of you who haven't been out to the Canary Islands, Tenerife South is about 40 minutes drive from Tenerife North and not, as the secretary booking the flights assumed, another terminal in the same airport.
Well this time when I finally got round to reading my inbound itinerary properly, which was about 20 minutes before landing in SFO in an attempt to figure out what flight to get on next, I discovered that I was stuck in San Francisco for 7 hours. I'm currently sitting at my departure gate, which was about 50 meters walk from my arrival gate, debating whether to try and get into the city for a few hours rather than camp out in the airport.
However I'm fairly comfortable here, unlike LAX there is actually a fairly decent food court air side, and of course the terminal is more or less fully covered by the T-Mobile wireless network. It also looks to be raining outside, so I might just stay put...
Update: They seem to have moved all the international flights to a brand new terminal building since last time I had an international connection at SFO, which really only goes to prove that I'm flying through LAX too much. Apparently I'm not 50 meters way from my departure gate, I'm in entirely the wrong terminal. Perhaps it also proves you can become a bit too blasé, time to go hunting for this new building. I knew I should have flown via Vancouver.
Update: So they have a shiny new terminal building, can anyone tell me why it appears to be almost entirely empty? It feels like a ghost town here...
The empty halls of SFO's International Terminal
United 36 out of KOA bound for SFO
I must admit at this point to committing one of the cardinal sins of the frequent traveller, not reading the return itinerary particularly carefully. You tend to get a bit blasé about travelling after a while, and just figure things will work out...
In the past this has left me on La Palma scheduled for an inter-island flight which would get me into Tenerife North with only 40 minutes between landing and take off of my connecting flight at Tenerife South. For those of you who haven't been out to the Canary Islands, Tenerife South is about 40 minutes drive from Tenerife North and not, as the secretary booking the flights assumed, another terminal in the same airport.
Well this time when I finally got round to reading my inbound itinerary properly, which was about 20 minutes before landing in SFO in an attempt to figure out what flight to get on next, I discovered that I was stuck in San Francisco for 7 hours. I'm currently sitting at my departure gate, which was about 50 meters walk from my arrival gate, debating whether to try and get into the city for a few hours rather than camp out in the airport.
However I'm fairly comfortable here, unlike LAX there is actually a fairly decent food court air side, and of course the terminal is more or less fully covered by the T-Mobile wireless network. It also looks to be raining outside, so I might just stay put...
Update: They seem to have moved all the international flights to a brand new terminal building since last time I had an international connection at SFO, which really only goes to prove that I'm flying through LAX too much. Apparently I'm not 50 meters way from my departure gate, I'm in entirely the wrong terminal. Perhaps it also proves you can become a bit too blasé, time to go hunting for this new building. I knew I should have flown via Vancouver.
Update: So they have a shiny new terminal building, can anyone tell me why it appears to be almost entirely empty? It feels like a ghost town here...
The empty halls of SFO's International Terminal
Monday, July 04, 2005
Deep Impact
At 05:52 UT Jul 4 (22:52 PDT Jul 3rd at JPL), the 372 kg impactor released from Deep Impact probe successfully smashed into Comet 9P/Tempel 1...
A view from JPL of the Deep Impact's flyby showing the impactor colliding with comet 9P/Tempel 1. (22:52 PDT, July 3)
Update: Post-impact images are starting to come in from the ground based observatories, and from the spacecraft itself...
Update: The International Herald Tribune has some local colour from out here in Hawaii, while the New Scientist takes a more in-depth look at the impact.
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| CREDIT: NASA TV |
Update: Post-impact images are starting to come in from the ground based observatories, and from the spacecraft itself...
| ||
| This image shows the initial ejecta that resulted when Deep Impact probe collided with comet 9P/Tempel 1 at 22:52 PDT, July 3. It was taken by the spacecraft's high-resolution camera 13 seconds after impact. |
| ||
| The Faulkes Telescope North can clearly see the expanding ejecta in the coma. Above is an image obtained by dividing an R-band image obtained at 08:35 UT by an earlier one taken at 06:24 UT. Positive (bright) pixels show the enhancement in R-band brightness in the inner coma at 08:35 UT. Image size is 85×62 arcsec, the apparent enhancement has a maximum brightness 2.5 arcsec from the center of the comet. |
Update: The International Herald Tribune has some local colour from out here in Hawaii, while the New Scientist takes a more in-depth look at the impact.
This is not the iPhone, redux...
Saturday, July 02, 2005
PSP httpd server
Since Frossie bought a PSP at the tail end of last week I've been keeping an eye on the developer community that's forming around this device. Not because I want one myself of course, err, but just for interest...
Despite this I was still surprised to stumble across a PSP httpd server, that's right, a web server for your PSP. While still in the early stages it lets you access the memory stick and the two internal flash devices over the web, and although of course even the author admits that he can't think of a good use for it, it has to count as one of the coolest toys I've seen in a while! But then I've got a web server running on my phone, so I wouldn't take my opinion if I were you...
Despite this I was still surprised to stumble across a PSP httpd server, that's right, a web server for your PSP. While still in the early stages it lets you access the memory stick and the two internal flash devices over the web, and although of course even the author admits that he can't think of a good use for it, it has to count as one of the coolest toys I've seen in a while! But then I've got a web server running on my phone, so I wouldn't take my opinion if I were you...
Friday, July 01, 2005
Astronomy Dashboard widgets
For the astronomers out there running Mac OS X, there is now a Dashboard widget that hooks into the ADS...
The widget in question...
Does anyone know of any more astronomy related widgets?
Update: Someone almost immediately mailed me to tell me about the Sunspot widget for you Solar-Terrestrial Physics guys...
A widget for the STP community
Update: I've now gone off and written some of my own widgets...
The widget in question...
Does anyone know of any more astronomy related widgets?
Update: Someone almost immediately mailed me to tell me about the Sunspot widget for you Solar-Terrestrial Physics guys...
A widget for the STP community
Update: I've now gone off and written some of my own widgets...
Death by a thousand cuts
Apple Matters seems to think that Longhorn and Microsoft are dying a death by a thousand cuts. You can see their point, barely a month goes by where you don't hear another announcement from Microsoft saying that Longhorn has been delayed yet again, or that it'll ship with even less features...
Annotating CPAN
Even the language's fiercest critics will usually acknowledge that CPAN is Perl's biggest advantage over the other high level languages like Python and Ruby. However, as for most open source projects, at times the documentation for some modules can be fairly thin on the ground.
However I've just stumbled across an article by Ivan Tubert-Brohman, published today, where he talks about his latest project AnnoCPAN which allows anyone to post public annotations in the margins of the module documentation.
I'm really excited about this, as it could be an amazingly useful tool if used correctly. I know there has been many occasions where I've struggled with a module interface, only to finally figure out that the code and the POD only bear a passing resemblance to each other. In these cases the module author is sometimes pretty unresponsive about fixing things, so it would be nice to be able to tell people about the problems with the relevant modules. Hopefully AnnoCPAN can solve this problem...
However I've just stumbled across an article by Ivan Tubert-Brohman, published today, where he talks about his latest project AnnoCPAN which allows anyone to post public annotations in the margins of the module documentation.
I'm really excited about this, as it could be an amazingly useful tool if used correctly. I know there has been many occasions where I've struggled with a module interface, only to finally figure out that the code and the POD only bear a passing resemblance to each other. In these cases the module author is sometimes pretty unresponsive about fixing things, so it would be nice to be able to tell people about the problems with the relevant modules. Hopefully AnnoCPAN can solve this problem...
Shuttle launch date
Despite continued worries over safety, NASA has announced a new launch date for return to flight of July 13th...
NASA Adminstrator Mike Griffin and senior managers announce the revised launch date for Discovery
Slashdot has the story, and no doubt lots of commentary...
 |
| CREDIT: NASA/KSC |
Slashdot has the story, and no doubt lots of commentary...
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