General

AT&T Bites

I’ve run into a little bit of a problem with my wireless service that I thought I’d share with y’all. I signed up with AT&T for a one year contract, with free phone thrown in. All good so far. I added a second phone for my wife, at $79.99 for the phone, and ten bucks a month extra for the service. Come billing time, we find that contrary to what we were told over the phone when we signed up, the second phone requires a two year contract, not a one year contract. OK. So let’s just eat our little sh*t sandwich and get on with life. They lied, but the hassle of fixing the problem outweighs the hassle of just dealing with it. Trying to sort out an unrelated billing issue, I’m informed that actually, we’re now obligated to a two year contract on *both* phones. Needless to say, there was no mention of this when we talked to them, despite explicitly asking about modifications to the original contract. F*ck that! cancel both contracts, have your damn phones back, and here’s a nice idea for where exactly you can put them… “We’d be happy to cancel the contracts, at a fee of $175. Per line. ”

Ma Bell, meet Mr Tenacious Bastard, Attorney at Law. I’ll update as things develop. In the meantime, I suggest you avoid doing business with mendacious *ssholes. Just a suggestion.

General

Victor Graham MacBurney

The title of this post is the name of my maternal grandfather, known to his friends as ‘Mac’. He was a tobacconist and newsagent, a quiet, intelligent man who raised his daughter to think for herself and to delight in words and ideas. It is from him that I get my love of language and music.

This being Memorial Day weekend I thought I’d mention him in honor of his service to King and Country. He fought in the RAF as a navigator on a Mosquito nightfighter, escorting bombers on raids against Nazi Germany. For a few months he was acting squadron leader after the man who had held the position was shot down. He never talked about his experiences during the war. When it was all over he returned home to the little apartment above the shop in Southend-on-Sea, and set about the business of raising my mum and uncle.

There can be no doubt that but for the courage and sacrifice of men like Mac, the world would be a much worse place today. I doubt that any are reading this blog, but if you are, thank you.

Technology and Society

Creative Commons License 2.0

The latest revision of the Creative Commons License has been released. Creative Commons is an attempt to deal with some of the messiness of intellectual property law by making it simple to create a roll-your-own license permitting certain kinds of use and forbidding others. If you create IP, take a look. Creative commons provides a way for you to encourage creative people to build on your work while retaining some measure of control.

Hat tip: Joi Ito

General Science

ICC conference, day 3

This was the last day of scientific presentations, and it ended on a high note with a banquet, about which more later. L. J. Perkins did an excellent overview of fusion physics, and mentioned a couple of things in passing that caught my attention. The most significant is that p-B11 is viable as a fuel in fast ignition ICF. In ICF a fuel pellet is compressed by depositing energy symmetrically on a spherical capsule, blowing off the outer layer. The resulting reaction force collapses the pellet to fusion relevant densities, heating in the process. Fast ignition is a scheme where you hit the compressed pellet at or just before the moment of maximum compression with an additional energy source (ion beam or laser) focused on a small spot. Ignition of the fusion fuel is initiated at the spot, and this serves as a spark plug which sends a shock front through the high density fuel, triggering fusion throughout the volume. The nice thing about ICF is that the fuel density is really high, so the mean free path for photons is really short, smaller than the size of the pellet. This means that bremstrahlung, the traditional enemy of p-B11, is less of a problem, since bremstrahlung photons are captured within the pellet, rather than escaping as they do with the lower density plasmas used in magnetic confinement.

Continue reading ICC conference, day 3 →

Administrative

Busy

Probably no posts for a few days. I’m meeting some work deadlines today, and flying to Florida tomorrow morning to unpack the moving van, which will probably consume the weekend. But keep checking back–Andrew can probably tell you all about the fusion conference.

Science And Society

The Sky Was Falling

It turns out that, for the expedition that lost so many people on Everest eight years ago, Chicken Little was right.

An analysis of weather patterns in May 1996 suggests the mountaineers died when the stratosphere sank to the level of the summit, 29,000ft above sea level.

The freak weather caused pressure and oxygen levels to plunge within the “death zone” – the area above 26,000ft where the oxygen is extremely thin.

General Science

ICC highlights, day 2

Today had some fairly cool space related stuff, starting with the first talk of the day, by Alan Hoffman of RPPL. His topic was Field Reversed Configurations, and he mentioned space propulsion as one of the applications. The nice thing about FRCs is that they include open field lines, which means the field lines are not circling the plasma, but exit the fusion device – all magnetic field lines are topologically circles, but there is an important distinction between lines that enclose plasma and ones that do not. Open field lines allow plasma to be expelled, providing propulsion. Obviously this is utterly useless if you don’t have net power gain in the reactor, but hey… Anyway, FRCs are a good candidate for the fusion power core in fusion powered spacecraft, if they ever materialize.

Continue reading ICC highlights, day 2 →

Political Commentary

Wacky Politics

I’m hearing that John Effing Kerry is going to accept the nomination at, of all strange places and times, the convention. What a weird world we live in, that this is big news.

Actually, I think that he declined to accept it there before he decided to accept it there. We’ll see how many times he changes his mind again between now and July.

And for those who didn’t see it via Glenn or other places, Mickey has a pretty funny (and vicious) take on this (no obvious permalink–look for the May 26th, 2004 posting if you’re reading this from the future).

Technology and Society

The Benefits Of A Database Nation

Amidst all the angst about loss of privacy in the modern age (a little amusing, considering what a modern invention privacy is), Declan McCullagh has an interesting article on the unsung good things about having your name in databases in this month’s Reason (the one with the customized cover that shows an aerial view of the subscriber’s neighborhood).

One part of the article puzzled me though:

MBNA grew to more than 51 million customers through its aggressive “affinity” program, which let a number of groups — NASCAR, universities, the Atlanta Braves, and so on — market credit cards imprinted with their own logos. Not counting its existing customers, in 2000 MBNA had a database of 800 million names of prospective cardholders provided by affinity groups, but it could afford to send only 400 million solicitations.

Writing in the Duke Law Journal in February 2003, Indiana law professor Fred Cate and Georgetown business professor Michael Staten described how MBNA winnowed its list down to an affordable size through aggressive information sharing. MBNA first looked at public records and then, by exchanging information with its affiliates, tried to evaluate the creditworthiness of the remaining names on the list. The remaining 400 million people received solicitations with the endorsement of the affinity group to which they belonged.

In what country did this take place? Is this worldwide? The population of the US is around three hundred million, last time I checked, and many of them are of insufficient age to be eligible for credit. Where did they come up with eight hundred million names?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!