OceanPark

2-13-05 The World's Worst Natural Disasters

Someone recently asked where the recent Tsunami disaster ranked in terms of the deadliest natural disasters. While it is certainly at or near the top of the worst in the history of humankind, it pales when compared to other events. Although our planet is (so far) the only known place hospitable enough to support and sustain life, there have been at least five times when much of that life was reduced to so much dead and decaying biomass.

There were at least five mass extinctions in earth's very distant path. Some suggest that we are, at best, on the cusp of the sixth extinction or, at worst, knee deep in it. Here's the scary part about that. In terms of geologic time, it is now widely believed that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction occurred over the course of about 10,000 years. That is considered "an instant" for 4.5 billion year old planet. But it is an unfathomably slow passage of time for human beings, meaning that we could be in the middle of a mass extinction and not even know it.

Known Events

Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: 439 million years ago; Severe global cooling that led to an Ice Age that dramatically lowered sea levels. Two events suspected, the first from the shock of the sudden glaciation, the second from the shock of its sudden end. Toll: 25% of all marine families (a family can include a few or several thousand species); 60% of all marine genera (a class more extensive than a species, such as all four-legged animals as opposed to all four-legged mammals). Life on land, if any, very limited at the time.

Late Stage Devonian Extinction: 364 million years ago. Cause disputed; no generally accepted theories. Toll: 22% of all marine families; 57% of all marine genera.

Permian-Triassic Extinction: 251 million years ago. Several possible causes: comet or asteroid impact, but, unlike the more recent Cretaceous-Tertiary, no likely crater has been discovered; massive volcanic activity from the Siberian Traps depleting ocean oxygen levels; the former (comet or asteroid) may have caused the latter (Siberian Traps); also suspected massive release of frozen methane from the ocean. Toll: all life nearly extinguished; 90% to 95% of all marine species died.

End Stage Triassic Extinction: 214 million to 199 million years ago. Suspected cause is the creation of the present day Atlantic Ocean resulting from massive volcanism. Toll: 22% of all marine families, 52% of marine genera.

Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Extinction: 65 million years ago. Suspected causes: massive asteroid impact at present day Yucatan Peninsula and gulf of Mexico; massive volcanism at the Deccan Traps in present day India; possibly the former (asteroid) causing the latter (Deccan Traps). Toll: 16% of all marine families, 47% of all marine genera, 18% percent of all land vertebrates.

Suspected Events

Each of the aforementioned extinctions took place during the Phanerozoic Eon, which began 543 million years ago and continues today. But most of earth's history came before that, in Precambrian time, which began 4.5 billion years ago.

#1. 650 million years ago. Believed by some to be earth's first mass extinction, killing off 70% of Precambrian flora and fauna, long before the development of hard-bodied and complex organisms.

#2. Vendian. 543 million to 523 million years ago. Before the rise of hard-bodied, complex organisms. Claimed creatures similar to today's jellyfish, sea worms and segmented worms.

#3. Jurassic. 206 million to 144 million years ago. (Two) More than 80% of marine bivalves and other shallow water species in the first. Stegosaurs and most sauropods did not survive the second.

#4. Oligocene. 33.7 million to 23.8 million years ago. Land mammals most affected.

#5. Late Miocene to Pleistiocene. As many as six separate events. The most recent, about 11,000 years ago, marked the end of mastodons, wooly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and large ground sloths.

2-13-05 climateprediction.net, Team Ars Baked Alaska

Logged on as raven5655 to climateprediction.net, Team Ars Baked Alaska. Ars Technica produced more SETI classic units than any other team and I've always admired their zeal. It feels good to add my little 13.7GHz home network to their fold.

2-9-05 The Difference Between Moms and Dads

My wife came home frantic the other day. It seems our four-year-old son, Julian, decided to lay some rubber down on the pavement for the first time by making his bike skid. Somehow, he tumbled off and managed to scrape both his knees.

"You have to talk to him and tell him to never do that again," my wife told me. "I thought I was going to have a heart attack."

Of course, being a dad, I decided instead to instruct my son on the finer points of bike skidding. I was remembering my own childhood and how we used to see who could lay down the longest skid.

"Go a little slower than your top speed. Keep your weight back on the foot that's doing the braking, and make sure you keep your handlebars straight," I said.

My son looked a little exasperated and said, "Dad, I wasn't trying to skid."

"No? Then what were you doing?"

"I was trying to do a 180," my son said. This is skateboard lingo for a trick in which the rider kicks up into the air and turns the board around and then lands on it, with the front end of the board winding up as the tail end. I had an immediate image of my son trying to whip his bike around so that he was facing in the opposite direction.

"Really?!?," I said. "That is so cool!"

My son and I exchanged high fives, and then I remembered what my wife asked me to do.

"Uh, son. Do me a favor and save the 180s for the skateboard, okay?"

"Okay Dad."

A few minutes later, I'm in the kitchen with my wife.

"So, did you talk to him about it?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah. You know, I don't think he's going to try any more skids on the bike," I said.

"That's a relief," my wife said.

2-7-05 Intel Upstaged Again

One of my three favorite computer magazines, along with Computer Shopper and Maximum PC, is free: ComputerUser. For years, I've only used it for the ads, which include most of the local computer builders in Southern California, just to keep an eye on the most common configurations, CPUs, video cards, etc. But lately, I've begun to read the articles (ha ha).

One of the most interesting was from James Mathewson, ComputerUser's editor-at-large, on how the mainstream media got it wrong when they were analyzing IBM's recent sale of its personal computing division to Lenovo, China's largest pc maker.

Mathewson said that IBM's move was not a retreat from the personal computing business that it practically invented, but rather a shedding of the paltry profit margins from the 'Wintel' pc business, where the lion's share of the profits go to Intel Corp. and to Microsoft.

Sure enough, just as Intel tried to regain a little momentum after the butt kicking it has received from Advanced Micro Devices, announcing that it has begun production of its first dual core CPUs, IBM and Sony and Toshiba steal the show by announcing what sounds like true breakthrough technology.

Those three companies are developing the Cell, a revolutionary computer chip with the equivalent of--get this--NINE processors onboard! It is the rough equivalent of a supercomputer on one chip.

IBM isn't abandoning the pc market, it is looking to crush it with a market of its own. Exciting stuff.

Here's one article from the heart of Silicon Valley on the Cell, from the San Jose Mercury News:

CELL TECHNOLOGY EXPECTED TO CHALLENGE INTEL.

By Dean Takahashi

Mercury News

In a bid to upend the computer industry, IBM, Sony and Toshiba on Monday unveiled a new supercomputer-on-a-chip that could change the nature of digital entertainment.

The Cell chip, which will first be used in Sony's Play Station 3 video console next year, could challenge Intel's domination of computing, analysts said.

IBM and its partners predict the Cell chip will be used in devices ranging from from handheld computers to supercomputers. IBM plans to put the chip in computer servers and work stations while Toshiba will use it in digital TV sets.

For consumers, that means they eventually could be able to buy a machine that runs video games so realistic that players will feel like they are inside the animated world of ``Shrek 2,'' according to the companies.

They say Cell chips also will give handheld devices the capability of a supercomputer.

Jim Kahle, a fellow at IBM, said the first Cell chip will operate at speeds greater than 4 gigahertz and will run software more than 10 times faster than the fastest personal computers today.

``This is a shot across the bow for Intel,'' said Richard Doherty, an analyst at the Envisioneering Group, a consulting firm in Seaford, N.Y.

``Intel still uses an architecture that came from a calculator chip,'' he said. ``Cell comes from a clean sheet of paper, where the engineers had the freedom to design from scratch for machines that manipulate images.''

Analysts said Monday that the Cell design is a step forward in computer architecture because balances speed, flexibility and low power consumption.

For now, the Cell chip's potential is unproven, since Sony has not yet revealed the capabilities of its forthcoming PlayStation 3. The consumer electronics giant plans to disclose initial details of the video game console in late March.

The Cell chip will be able to simultaneously access 128 pieces of memory. Each chip will contain the equivalent of nine processors. One is a 64-bit PowerPC processor that serves as the central dispatcher of software and data for the rest of the processors. It will be able to process 256 gigaflops. A gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations a second.

That is 40 times the mathematical ability of the chip in Sony's current PlayStation 2.

Intel executive Pat Gelsinger said in a recent interview that Sony has promised great things before. He noted the PlayStation 2 chip, dubbed the Emotion Engine, failed to live up to its promise to power a wide variety of consumer electronics.

Robert Manetta, an Intel spokesman, noted Monday that a new computing design requires host of new software and programming tools for it to become it useful.

Still, there is no indication that Intel has a response to the Cell chip in the works. On Monday, Intel said that it will begin selling personal computer microprocessors with two processors on a single chip by the summer.

But no one expects those chips to have anywhere near the processing power of the Cell, which will be made by IBM and Sony.

The Cell project also will have a significant impact on Los Altos-based Rambus, which designed the techniques for keeping the Cell processor fed with data.

Hence, for every Cell chip, Rambus is expected to get a slice of the revenues as royalties.

Analysts were intrigued that the Cell uses IBM technology that enables it to run any operating system.

Kevin Krewell, editor of the Microprocessor Report, said that raises the possibility that Apple Computer, which already uses the PowerPC design upon which Cell is based, could use the new chips in future Macintosh computers. Of course, winning over Apple might be considered a small ambition for the IBM-Sony-Toshiba alliance.

``Cell really represents a supercomputer on a chip,'' Kahle said.

---

2-6-2005 climateprediction.net

Well, this might be the project I've been looking for, something worthwhile and interesting. The only forseeable problem is that it's based on the dreaded Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networking Computing, which I loathe in its SETI form. Perhaps this version works better.

Well, I'll give it a try. Taking part in the world's largest climate experiment sounds like serious fun.

Finally got my gaming rig back from the guys on Saturday. It's sitting here in the office, waiting for me to summon the energy to reinstall about, oh, say 150 gigabytes of stored files...from CDs! Do the math. After the Super Bowl, maybe... Yes, I have learned my lesson. Every computer in the house now has a dual layer 16x dvd burner.

In the meantime, here's some more about climateprediction.net.

"What is climateprediction.net?

Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

The climateprediction.net experiment should help to "improve methods to quantify uncertainties of climate projections and scenarios, including long-term ensemble simulations using complex models", identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 as a high priority. Hopefully, the experiment will give decision makers a better scientific basis for addressing one of the biggest potential global problems of the 21st century. The results from climateprediction.net experiment will be fed into the work of the Quantifying Uncertainty in Model Predictions (QUMP) team at the Met Office and will form part of the UK contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC."

Relevant links: Project background; Experiment objectives; How to participate.

Relevant Articles on climate change: BBC News, 1-26-05; Toronto Star, 2-5-05; Hindustan Times 2-5-05 (beware, pop-ups, set phasers to stun); Reuters, 2-5-05.