Sunday Evening Blogging

A Simple Computer Science Quiz

Each of the people pictured below were responsible for major advances in computer science. Do you know who they are?

#1

#2

#3

Neil Tyson on NASA

Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks eloquently on how NASA relates to the future of our country. I feel exactly the same way and I'm envious of his awesome powers of communication.

2010 New Computer (#2)

Here's a quick pictorial tour through the build process:

The SuperMicro Chassis arrives from UPS! I added a standard 3.5" hard drive for scale. This chassis is big.


Various states of working through putting the system together.






Done! (somewhat)

The reason I say "somewhat" done is due to the fact that the power supply that arrived with the case does not have two 8 pin CPU connectors. Unbeknown to me, newer Intel Xeon motherboards require two 8 pin connectors for a total of four 12 volt inputs (each 8 pin has two 12 volt inputs) for dual processor machines. The PSU in the SuperMicro case only has one 8 pin connector and a 4 pin connector.

I found a molex + 4 pin to 8 pin connector on newegg that will do the trick. (Watch out for the single 4 pin to 8 pin converters. Those connectors may solve your problem but only provide 12 volts on half the number of wires. If the CPU draws too much power, the two 18 gage wires coming out of the PSU may get hot enough to burn through their insulation.)

Ultimately, I'm left with a sad (depressing) state of affairs. I can't play with my brand new new $2000+ machine until I receive a $6 cable from newegg. Grrrr.....

2010 New Computer (#1)

Here are pictures of my new computer parts. I can't start the build because the chassis and power supply have yet to arrive. I can provide, however, the list of equipment:

• 1 x SuperMicro CSE-743T-645B chassis
• 2 x Intel Xeon 5506 Nehalem processors
• 1 x SuperMicro X8DTi-LN4F motherboard
• 6 x Kingston 2GB ValueRAM
• 2 x Segate 160GB SATA drives (rpool)
• 3 x Samsung 1TB SATA drives (storage pool)
• 1 x PQI 32GB Flash drive (to create hybrid storage pool)

You'll notice no DVD drive. Only network or USB installation for me! :)

D&D & Relationships?

While browsing the local Barnes & Noble bookstore, I came across the picture above. A B&N conspiracy to poke fun at nerds? A random attempt at humor by an unknown passerby? Either way, I found it damn funny.

Liquid Water... On Mars!?

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of the coolest robots ever sent forth from Earth's warm berth into the cold deep unknown by NASA, has returned back some amazing data from it's HiRISE camera once again. MRO's primary mission is to orbit Mars and take high resolution photos in the name of SCIENCE! Luckily for us, it snapped the picture above which shows evidence for liquid water on Mars.

A billion years ago, liquid water was abundant on Mars. But now? We used to think "No way!" because there's so little atmospheric pressure and it's soooo cold. The question is, can water stick around for a few seconds or even minutes to create the channels seen above? Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has details.

Sunday Evening Blogging

A new diet craze has swept the inter-tubes and has been lauded as "a revolution in weight loss". The claims of this diet are pretty amazing. Specifically, the claim I came across went something to the effect of "a friend of a friend lost 3o to 40 pounds in a month". Wow, if that's true, who needs liposuction?

Since my Sunday Skeptic antenna was keen on checking the veracity of this extraordinary weight loss claim, I began to poke around and dig up references and data on this new diet. It was called The hCG Diet. hCG stands for Human Chorionic Gonadotropin and is a hormone produced in pregnant women who are, well, pregnant.

The basic premise behind the diet is that by taking HCG along with dietary modifications, you can lose a ridiculous amount of weight. Up to 1 to 3 pounds a day. HCG proponents say that during pregnancy HCG almost completely controls a woman's metabolism and that in non-pregnant persons, HCG increases the metabolism similar to pregnant females.

Now you can either inject HCG or take it orally. Wait, what? I was under the impression that injection and ingestion had very different mechanisms by which a substance enters the blood stream. Whatever, maybe two modalities were researched and two different drugs were created to meet the needs of a discerning public.

The accompanying diet modifications require the dieter to intake only 500 calories a day. The HCG folks call this a Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD). Seriously, after reading this statement, my jaw dropped. 500 calories a day isn't much at all. In fact, the FDA bases their percentage daily values on those Nutrition Facts labels on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. (If you haven't read the FDA site on the Nutrition Facts labels I linked to, take a gander, it's worth it.)

At this point, I'd become very skeptical of the HCG diet claims. Mostly because anyone on a 500 calorie a day diet will most likely lose weight due to a lack of proper energy intake. By only ingesting 1/4 the amount of energy your body needs to think, walk and talk your body is going to get the energy from elsewhere. Usually it gets it from the bodies internal store of energy, fat. You reduce energy intake, your body increases energy uptake from fat and, presto chango, you lose weight.

Truthfully, there are a lot of warning signs that the HCG diet is a fraud and probably shouldn't be followed. Kevin Trudeau's push of the diet for one. Trudeau is a modern day snake oil salesman who has been convicted several times for lying about his product's ability to cure you. I have very little sympathy for this man especially since he proffers fake 'natural' cures for life threatening diseases like cancer. It's disheartening to see someone bypass chemotherapy for raw vegetables.

Also, I did a quick check of pubmed.gov (a site that collects and indexes medical citations) and found that HCG's effects on weight loss had been studied and deemed no more effective than injections of placebo.

I did, however, take a little pleasure in skimming the book "Pounds and Inches" of the HCG diet progenitor one Dr. A.T.W. Siemeons. The book is a heap of silliness with nary a double blind trial in site but this quote tickled my fancy the most "Throughout his research, Dr. Simeons noted how patients lost significant amounts of weight while their bodies reshaped naturally- without exercise, and without effort." LOL! Without exercise or effort, the telltale sign of a weight loss charlatan.

So, if you're planning to lose weight, do your research before jumping into the next internet fed craze. And always remember, caveat emptor. :)

Sunday Evening Blogging

This picture isn't very pretty. It's grainy and doesn't contain anything with sharp definition. Its content wouldn't make a good Michael Bay blow'em up showcase or a very good movie at all. Despite all of this, I find this picture to be one of the most profound ever snapped.

In February of 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft (V'ger, for all you Trekies) was nearing the edge of our solar system. With its primary science missions completed, Carl Sagan urged NASA to turn Voyager 1 around and snap a picture of the Earth from 3.7 billion miles away (6 billion kilometers).

You can see Earth in this picture by following the brownish band of color on the right down about halfway to a tiny blue dot. Sagan called this a "Pale Blue Dot" and wrote a book about it with the same name. Why do I consider this picture profound? Sagan answers this question eloquently:

Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Interestingly enough, one of the technicians that designed the command sequence to turn Voyager 1 around and snap the picture was Carolyn Porco of the University of Arizona. You've probably seen Carolyn on History Channel's Universe among other things.

Pretty neat, eh? ;)