I just clicked on the NASA.gov site to see what was new. I became engrossed in the various animations created from NASA images and this one, which is composite of artistic and real images.

I am having trouble with this. It does not want to embed correctly. Click here to play the movie.

You can see a new icon on the bottom of each post.

This runs a little JavaScript routine that opens up the blogger "new post" window and lets anyone who uses blogger.com blog about my blog post. Just click the image and a blogger.com user now has a new blog entry.

This version is blogger specific. I also have a version that I’m going to add to my non-blog web sites. I should write up a technical explanation, but it is one of those things that is easy to reverse engineer for a technical person, but is hard to explain to a non-technical person.

Justine sent me some pictures of the house she stayed at in Martha’s Vineyard. She was on the West side of the Island, near Gay Head Lighthouse (named for the gayly colored mud).

My friend Phil likes to take pictures of the mud bath near Gay Head. There is a place where multicolor mud comes down the side of the cliff there and people like to take mud baths, often in the nude.

Justine just sent me pictures of the house – no muddy nudes. It looks like a very very nice place, but she did not invite me or Larry out for the trip. Then again, Larry and I did not invite her on our trip.

Here is a picture from the web of Gay Head and the colored cliffs.

Jacob Nielsen has a new article on reducing bounce rates on websites. I have a lot of clicks into what Nielsen calls a deep web page, and then the user is gone. I’d like for surfers to hang around and try a few more pages. I will try to follow some of his recommendations.

While I am on the subject of traffic, I have been following a discussion of Chitika premium ads. Chitika is sort of like AdSense, except their ads are not as smart in some ways. They show ads that will get clicks, no matter what the content on your page. The trade off is that an AdSense ad shows ads targeted to the people interested in your page content. Chitika ads are targeted to a more general reader and they pay better. You can have both types of ads, but it does clutter your page.

The new Chitika premium ads are only shown to users who have hit your site through a search engine. Your normal users will see no ad. Chitika says that most normal surfers ignore ads, but that users using search engines are much more likely to click an ad. The ads are geared towards the keyword search from the search engine and not the content on the page. This is pretty slick. I put the ads on one website and I tripled the Chitika revenue, but it is still not as good as AdSense. The Chitika ads still look too much like ads and people don’t like to click ads.

Since the new ads are like affiliate links and don’t pay per click, it may be a while before I see the real revenue from these ads. I’ll keep you posted.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
Chitika

I took the bus this morning from West Nyack to White Plains. It was awful and I still feel sick.

The NYS Thruway was backed up from the bridge 10 miles because of an early morning accident. The bus schedule was all screwed up. I caught a local version of the TZ Express at about 8:20. It made stops all the way from West Nyack to South Nyack and then stopped along rte. 119 in Westchester. I got off at 9:06 (there is a digital clock in the bus).

The smell of the fumes and the bouncing quickly made me sick. I was listening to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The thought of all those drugs in the book made me feel sick, too.

I missed my big comfortable gas guzzling truck.

Here’s a quote from Hunter S. Thompson:

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

Erica and I went down into New Jersey to a community garage sale at Morse Lake. The sale was mostly a waste, but we had a good time driving around the lake.

Here are some of the views around Morse Lake

From Morse Lake we went to what I think is Glenn Wild Lake. (Erica thinks it might be upper Morse Lake.) We took tiny roads where the truck could barely make it through and saw beautiful scenes of nature. The small communities that live at these lakes are different from the snobby "summer people" that go to other destinations. Some of these houses date back to the 1920s and most are handed down through families for years.

Then on the way back, we stopped by Eagle Lake, where I learned to swim back in the 1950s. The lake was abandoned for many years, but has since been cleaned up somewhat. The lump of green is an island. My Grandfather built a bridge out of logs and branches to the island and he cleaned it up and put a picnic bench on it. The place was so overgrown that I could not get near the place where the bridge was located.

I’ve been receiving Google Alerts for a couple of months now and they have resulted in about 20 blog entries. I think that this is a very useful product.

You may not realize this, but I have 6 other blogs. I have a couple of Harmonica related blogs, the cat blog, a tech blog and another blog that I don’t really use much anymore. I also have a blog that use for testing template features and that one gets a few hits because I discuss ways to use css and html to format a blog.

I find the Google Alerts very helpful in providing content for my blogs. I like the Nyack alert because it keeps me updated on what’s happening in my home town, especially which of my old friends and neighbors have been arrested. I come from a part of Nyack, called Central Nyack, that can be a rough neighborhood.

For every blog entry I get from Google Alerts, I discard 40 or 50. It occurred to me that these alerts are of interest, even though they might not make a good blog entry. I decided to revive the idea of a Blog Carnival – a blog consisting of nothing but links. I started this morning to write the code to convert the alerts automagically into blog entries and I am making progress. I am trying to design it as open ended as I can so that I can make many blog carnivals and let them run without my intervention. These, of course, will be monetized with ads so that they will make me money.

I’ll let you know when I finish the project. I was thinking of having carnivals for “Bio Fuel”, “Cats”, various harmonica stuff, maybe something with science fiction related announcements, and “Nyack”. I am thinking about having some medical related lists that might link to higher paying ads. Once I get it working, I can have as many blogs, automatically fed by the alerts, as I wish. I would just have to compose a template for each one.

First cut on this for the google alert biofuel is at http://www.gthread.com/alert

I expect that I will be able to improve a little on performance by caching the results, but all the parts are there except the formatting.

With the price of oil being so high it is only logical that money is flowing into any company that promises to make fuel from non-mineral resources. All it will take is for crude to stay above $100 a gallon for another year or two and it will be end of drilling for oil forever. Don’t sell your oil stock, yet, but when a successful alternative fuel goes to market it will be too late.

This latest announcement comes from Australian CSIRO and Monash University. They claim to have a way of producing crude oil components from low quality waste.

The researchers are targeting low value waste such as forest thinnings, crop residues, waste paper and garden waste, significant amounts of which are currently dumped in landfill or burned . These contain lignocellulose which is renewable and potentially greenhouse gas neutral. It is predominantly found in trees and is made up of cellulose; lignin, a natural plastic; and hemicellulose.

One of these schemes is going to kick in. With the price of heating fuel so high, I can predict hundreds or even thousands of deaths due to lack of heat this winter. I can also predict that the electorate will be angry enough that Congress will have to act, offering tax breaks and grants to anyone developing alternative fuels and green technology.

There was an auction for an original Science Fiction League Membership card and I captured the images. The card was from 1934 and it is a promotional item from Thrilling Wonder Stories, one of Hugo Gernsback’s many titles after he lost control of Amazing Stories.

I did my best to clean up the images. I had a packet of business cards blanks and I made up 10 of these. Drop me a line and I’ll snail mail you one. There are seven left. First come first serve.

Ollie was the only cat who missed me and was glad to see me.

We made it back around 5pm on Saturday afternoon. I have had my mind set reworked and I guess I can put up with another 4 or 5 years of drudge work before I take another vacation.

I had Lobster twice, Steamers once and consumed 5 cups of thick real New England Clam Chowder- not the kind that you get in cans in the rest of the county. Real chowder (pronounced chow-dah) is made from cream and has giant clams in it called Quayhogs, with big chunks of white potato. I will not be getting on the scale for a few weeks.

The trip cost us about $180 in gas, as I overestimated the cost of gas (as low as $3.97 in Plymouth) and underestimated the Mileage that Larry’s car got. The Hotel was about $150 for two people for two nights and we spent more on food than we wanted, although we found a place that served a good lobster dinner for $14, including chow-dah and desert.

Larry and I got lost a bit and once the GPS unit had us off-roading for an hour through the dunes on a track that was nothing more than two ruts in the sand. I’ve  got the smell of the sea in my nostrils and I woke up to the screaming of gulls. More than ever I want a house on the coast to retire in and write my novel.

I can recommend an off season vacation to the Cape to anyone. In the summer, the place is crowded, but before the July 4th weekend and after Labor day, there is much to do and see and the tourists are sparse.

I have a few more pictures and a video, but I might not get to them.

Larry and I came home today, saying goodbye to Cape Cod. Part of our vacation strategy is get lost and find new things. We went down the coast of Cape Cod and hit about 20 garage sales, as we randomly took promising turns.

The Mashpee Flea Market was now a mall and had been for years so we headed north to the Saginaw bridge and started back home. After an hour of riding, I got off the main highway and turned south at random to see what we could find in the way of garage sales. We stumbled on the Grafton Antique Show.

The Grafton show was high end antiques, well out of my price range. One of my marching orders was to find antique samplers for Erica. The ones that I saw were all hundreds or even thousands of dollars, but I took some quick pictures for Erica.

These were the gatekeepers.

Larry and I, due to someone forgetting to pack the tackle, did not go fishing. The day, however was great. We took some back roads and got lost and went along the shore north of Chatham (pronounced chat ‘em). We stopped at the Chatham lighthouse. We wound up lost at a boat landing in a very beautiful section of Chatham. We took a wrong turn looking for a garage sale and we found a very beautiful house.

Here are the pictures. Blogger is down so it may take a day before you see this.

We are staying at the Americas Best Value Inn & Suites at 206 main St. Hyannis, MA. 508-775-5225.

The place is much better than some of the dives that Larry and I have stayed at. It is not a luxury hotel and has few amenities. They have two pools, however and free Internet wifi. The wifi is slow, I think it is 802.11b, but it works well.

The place is full of fishermen. Larry saw a guy from Central Nyack, who is staying here. The last time that I saw him he was a skinny kid about 10 years old, but Larry recognized him. He signed up for a fishing junket on one of the boats and got a package deal. For two days fishing, two nights at the hotel and two dinners at a buffet restaurant it only costs $150. That’s about what Larry and I paid for the two nights.

If you stay here, don’t expect much except a reasonably clean room. It is not the Ritz, but it is better than any of the other places that Larry has talked me into staying. I am glad I researched this on the Internet before we came. $55 a night spring, $89 a night summer. Damn, today is the first day of summer and the rates went up.

We went down to Spanky’s on the Hyannis docks last night and had Steamers. I had found a Blues Bar on the Internet that had a Thursday night jam, but the place was shut down. Blues gets no respect.

Here are some pics of the hotel.

You can see in the picture below the short distance down main towards the center of town. You can walk everywhere from this motel.

Persy’s is right across the street and it’s where we had breakfast. It was too expensive, though.

The guitar store opens at 10:30 and I have to wake Larry up from his morning nap so we can go down and look at stuff we can’t afford. We are going down the coast to hang on a beach after that. Larry forgot to pack the fishing tackle so we have to pretend that we are fishing.

Come on Larry! Wake up. Our vacation is a wasting. (He is snoring like a chain saw.)

We went up to Cape Cod, stopping by Plymouth. I tried to take pictures of the Standish Sampler for Erica, but the pictures didn’t come out. I didn’t take many still pictures, so here are the videos.

I uploaded these to Vimeo, a video service similar to YouTube, but easier to use.

First is us taking out across the TZ bridge

Cape Cod Vacation 1 from jt30guy on Vimeo.

Next is Plymouth Rock.

Larry and Keith at Plymouth Rock from jt30guy on Vimeo.

Last is Larry explaining about the Mayflower.

Larry and Keith at the Mayflower from jt30guy on Vimeo.

My brother and I used to take off a long weekend in June every year to go to Cape Cod, but we haven’t done this in over ten years. Larry has this week off, and I am burning out, so the Graham brothers are off to the Cape at the crack-of-dawn tomorrow. We will spend a couple of days surf fishing and going to flea markets and garage sales. I know, it is not exciting, but the Cape is beautiful in June, and not crowded at all.

I might talk Larry into taking the ferry over to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. I intend have have steamers for dinner, something that I have not had in over ten years. We might go up to Wellfleet for lunch at a lobster pound. I want to bring a bottle of wine to go with the lobster.

June is considered off season on the Cape and it is remarkably inexpensive compared to some places. The food is good, the motels are cheap and there is much to do.

One year we stayed at a place with a character named "Captain Jack" running the motel. He asked us if we were "Ham and Eggers" and said that after July 4, that’s all he got was Ham and Eggers. I’m still not sure what that means (check this link), but I don’t think we are Ham and Eggers. At the motel, we sit out on the porch of the hotel and Larry plays guitar and I play harmonica, but no one complains.

The gas prices might actually work in our favor. The Cape is an easy day trip from Boston, but gas in Massachusetts is already over $4.50 a gallon. The Cape is about 250 miles each way and that’s about $100 for us. If we fill up in New Jersey we might not have fill up again until the way back in Connecticut where the gas is slightly cheaper. From Boston, the Cape is about 75 miles each way and only costs about $35 in gas, but the expense should keep out the Ham and Eggers.

I will be staying in Hyannis at a cheap motel ($55 a night) that claims to have wifi access so I am bringing a laptop. I hope that tomorrow night I can post the first pictures from the trip. I will bring the new camcorder that I bought at a garage sale, but the firewire cable has not yet arrived so I will not be able to post video until I get back.

Google indexes based on links. I was at a web site that did not allow the entry of html links so all URLs were entered as raw addresses. I was wondering if Google and other search engines were smart enough to follow these near-links to a web page. I made a couple of web pages and put a nonsense word on each one.

Given that Google is pretty good about spidering blog pages, by this time tomorrow I should know the answer.

Here are the not-quite-links:

http://www.cthreepo.com/linktest1.html

and

www.cthreepo.com/linktest2.html

Note: Here it is two days later and no index on the magic word. I checked Google, Ask, Live, AOL, Yahoo, gigablast, dogpile, mamma and technorati. I even checked with the venerable WebCrawler that I used back in the early days of the web. I will check back a couple of times in the next month, but I am guessing that unless the URL is contained in an <a> tag that it will never be indexed. Just mentioning the URL is not enough. It has to be in a link.

Tomorrow is the official release date of Firefox 3.0. This new version of the browser has many new features as well as running faster with a smaller memory footprint. When was the last time that you have heard of a program getting smaller and faster?

The link above is to a Firefox release party site. There aren’t any parties around here. Bummer. I would have liked to hang with absolute geeks like myself. I’ll have to download Firefox tomorrow without benefit of confetti or champagne.

(Anyone still running Internet Explorer… well that’s too bad.)

Here is another article about researches using genetically altered microbes to produce crude oil ready for a refinery. This one uses Yeasts or e. Coli to process anything with enough sugar or simple carbohydrates. The process of fermentation doesn’t produce methanol, but crude oil-like hydrocarbons. The microbes already produce fatty acids and alcohols, and hydrocarbons are only a short hop away. It was relatively easy to tweak the DNA so that they produced refineable crude.

Describing the task of modifying the microbes, Greg Pal of the LS9 company said: “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

I can’t find any financial information on LS9.

My previous post was about a genetically engineered algae and it required sunlight. This iteration might make use of e. Coli and I can see it feeding from diary and meat byproducts such as cow and chicken manure. It it used yeast, it could feed off of any mulch created from farm byproducts such as stalks, stems and leaves. My community has a leaf pickup, imagine these leaves and branches being chipped and added to a slurry which produces crude oil.

Why aren’t we doing this? Why are politicians talking about opening up Alaska to drilling when we can produce crude naturally?

In a trip to NJ this morning we passed an abandoned building with large turkey vultures guarding the parking area.

Neil Gaiman has reported on his blog that he recorded the intros to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories for Audible. The good news is not that Gaiman did the intros, although he is a good choice, but that the stories are going to appear as audio.

A few years ago I read some of the stories into tape so I could listen to them in the car. I set them aside so that when I did the listening, they would be fresh, but I don’t know where they are. Now I don’t have to dig through my piles of junk in the cellar to find them.

I have a friend who has an audible account. I have to nag him to download the stories as soon as they appear. I set him up with a version of goldwave and audible that can convert the audible files to mp3.

My favorite Mouser story is Bazaar of the Bizarre. It is one of my all time favorite stories and one that I recorded.

I hadn’t been looking at Duotrope or Ralan in a while. Since Speculations.com went pffft, I have been out of touch with the Spec Fic community. Another Realm’s board is all but dead, and the SamsDot board is primarily SamsDot business. I have even tried browsing sff.net, but their Usenet based discussion is clunky and for the most part not relevant.

I stopped by Ralan’s site to check out what is new and I noticed that he has a new genre classification. It is MagReal, short for Magic Realism. This used to be an artistic genre from the 1940s where realistically depicted subjects are presented with a fantastic or magical element. Literary MagReal is when a story is set in modern, very real settings and situations, but a fantastic element is added that is treated as real.

I immediately think of Heinlein’s Magic, Inc., which is a crime story about a society where magic is very real, but there is a crime syndicate that blackmails, murders and robs legitimate business. It is a pun on Murder, Inc. The story is told as a modern crime story with modern settings, except that magic is possible.

I think that Harry Potter might be the inspiration for MagReal and the reason why zines are looking for this kind of story. Harry lives in a modern, realistic England, yet there are fantasy themes that are treated with equal realism.

This kind of story was popular in Unknown Stories from the 1940s and was the forte of L. Sprague deCamp, one of my favorite writers. It was well done by writers like Poe and especially Hawthorne, who wrote some of the best fantasy stories ever. In Hawthorne’s stories, the fantastic is presented as ordinary and quite real.

The MagReal mode is quite old, but it seems to flourish as a contrast to the harsh realism of modern fiction. Adding an element of fantasy makes reality that much harsher and more threatening, and that is also one of the selling points of modern MagReal. The purpose of MagReal is often not escape, as in the Potter Books, but in contrasting the real and punching the impact in the harsh non-fantastic world.

Magic realism–a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the ‘reliable’ tone of objective realistic report. Designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folk tale, and myth while maintaining a strong contemporary social relevance. The fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels–levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis–are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

The Nyack Daily Snapshot Blog has a couple of pictures of that DAMNED TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE.

I bought tickets for the TZ Express Bus. $7 buys you 6-3/4 trips. I got them at the Shop Rite store where I buy groceries. I have reset the clock radio 15 minutes earlier and have every intention of trying to take the bus. Twice I actually thought that I could make it, but I saw the bus leaving as I drove into Lot J at the Palisades Mall.

I need to reprogram my internal clock to actually hear the clock radio go off and get up. In the morning I have a few chores to do like give Willie the Cat his insulin shot, and make the coffee, but nothing that takes such a long time that I can’t hurry things up to make the bus.

I found where the bus leaves from White Plains and I had a conversation with the driver about the trip.

Maybe tomorrow!

Nyack Daily Snapshot: Thursday Theme Day: Bridges

Sapphire Energy has a genetically altered algae that produces hydrocarbons as part of its metabolism. The stuff can be pumped into a refinery and cracked like crude oil to produce gasoline, diesel, and heating oil.

I tried to find out if they have over the counter stock, but it looks like the venture capitalists are all over this.

This only converts the energy of sunlight into a polluting fuel, but at least it could get us off of our dependency on imported oil. If congress would give algae a subsidy the way that they have given corn fuels a subsidy then this stuff would be up and running in a few years.

That’s the trouble with good ideas – they need someone to commit to them. Algae farmers don’t have a strong lobby.

Chris Perridas has antiquarian blog about old pulp magazines and I have added him to my “Good Morning” list of blogs that I read.

He has a nice picture of a note from F. Orlin Tremaine (who edited Astounding before Campbell) to Roy A. Squires who was a fan at the time, but went on to publish Fantasy and Horror including Ray Bradbury and Robert E. Howard. I would kill to own something like this.

Chris Perridas: Antiquarian Weird Tales: 1937 Letter Squires/Tremaine: “1937 Letter Squires/Tremaine”

This looks very interesting. I combines a PC keyboard and a MIDI keyboard. I want it, but I can’t figure a good justification for buying one.

It’s only $19.99 with free shipping. It seems sort of dumb not to buy it. It comes with a cover for the music keyboard so you can actually type. I don’t suppose that it would go over big here at work, though.

It would be the perfect present for the musician in your life.

The thing hooks to USB. This would work better with a full function sound card, but a standard sound card will have the regular MIDI instruments and the ability to edit and add instruments. Since sound is Creative.com’s forte, I am assuming it comes with some nice music composing software.

Prodikeys PC-MIDI – The Ultimate Keyboard for Work and Play

Algis Budrys is on my top ten favorite writers list. As an editor, reviewer and educator, in addition to his fiction writing, he had a great influence on Science Fiction. I will always associate him with the move away from Campbell’s engineering oriented SF to character based New Wave SF.

Nyack schools release students early due to heat.

Hey, I spent 13 years in Nyack Schools and I never once got out early due to heat! I started at Liberty Street School and you couldn’t even open the windows. I went to Hill Top Elementary and Jr. High and they used to get really hot in June and September. I went to the old Nyack High School that had precious little air circulation any time of the year (as I discovered when Mike Sivy and I set the Physics Lab on fire).

(Putting on my long white beard) The kids today have it easy. I remember when…

Back in the 1980s Hans Morovec estimated that the computing power of a human brain is about 100 TeraFlops. That is about 100 trillion floating point instructions per second. We use flops, which are floating point calculations, because they are a complex instruction. Many instructions such as add 1 to an integer execute extremely fast. A flop is a tough thing for a computer to do so it is used a benchmark for difficult calculating.

Other researchers have estimated the human brain’s computing power 1,000 times higher at 100 PetaFlops, which is 100,000 trillion flops.

In either case, super computers are approaching the computational power of the human brain. This is not to say that computers have been programmed to do human type thinking. Currently, super computers are being used for arithmetic. They crunch large numbers of values through difficult calculations. This is good for predicting weather, but has nothing to do with what a human brain does. In fact, human brains are particularly bad at arithmetic.

Sooner or later some clever programmer is going to take a human brain simulation and run it on one of these super beasts and get human-like thought.

The Singularity is the date when information hits the fan. It is when the trend lines go vertical and all change happens so fast that we can’t predict what happens afterwards. The earliest predicted date that I can find for the singularity is December 21, 2012, which is a calculated date from some outlaw programmers tweaking trend charts. I like to think the singularity happens on the day that a computer simulation of the human brain wakes up. It is the day that a computer is as smart or smarter than a human and knows it.

Most people don’t believe that this will happen, but I am certain that it will happen in the next 50 years, and it will be sooner rather than later. My own feel is that it will happen before my 70th birthday in 2021. I think a date like 2012 might be early, but I have a gut feeling that 30 years from now we will look back and identify the date as 2014. This is just a feeling.

The singularity is coming soon! Get your head together.

Today is John W. Campbell, Jr.’s birthday. He was born June 8, 1910.

Campbell was the editor of Astounding Stories and pretty much invented modern Science Fiction – or at least he attended at the birth.

Soon will be the JWCjr 100 year birthday. I hope someone remembers and does something cool.

I got this for free at a garage sale two weeks ago. The owner said that it didn’t work. I took a chance and bought a battery and charger for it for $12 and put in an old flash card. It seems to work. Here are some pictures from garage sailing this week.

So far it has been a very good deal. The 4Meg flash card can only hold 8 pictures so I have ordered a couple of one gig cards.

I bought a Canon Elura Camcorder at the same sale. I did well.