Centauri's Thoughts

Its now been almost 20 days since I opened a Twitter account. A lot has happened in this (somewhat short) timeframe.

In addition to some real time news about the ISS today (they had to stay in the Soyuz module, because of a possible space debris hit), there has been a LOT of chatter since Ellen DeGeneres has discovered twitter.
On Monday, Diddy explained it to her (sort of) on her show, and by today, she has an account set up and is trying for a million followers (She has more than 92,000 as of this post).

The clip of the show with Diddy got her interested and todays show said this.

There are a number of celebrities on twitter, but Ellen talking about it on her show and trying to get a million followers might make a huge increase in people very quickly. Not just for her, like most twitter users, they will begin to wonder “what else is out there?” and start exploring and finding things on their own.

In answer to that, I have been following some interesting tools to make using twitter more interesting, and a fair number of them come from Chris Pirillo

Chris lists a top 10, and 10 more, of those, I'll be listing the ones I find the most interesting plus a few I have found via other tweeters:

#1 Monitter
Hands down winner to me for real time. you have a default of 3 keywords to follow and that can be increased or decreased.

#2 twitscoop.com
An awesome way to see whats hot and trending, it even has graphs showing activity by the hour, (it showed todays spike about the space station)

#3 TweeTake
Allows you to make a local save of followers, friends, tweets, direct messages, or everything.

#4 twitpwr.com
Produces a tag cloud from the bio's of those you follow

For completeness, I include both of Chris Pirillo's lists

10 Twitterific tools

10 MORE must have twitter tools

Check them out, because we all have different uses for twitter, and what might not be of critical interest to me, might be just what you wanted!

Lithium Ion batteries can be made to charge MUCH faster by changing part of the process of how they are made

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

This is a factor of 18, so a laptop that takes 2 hours to charge now would only be 6.66 minutes. A large Lithium Ion battery (say for a hybrid or EV car) needing an 8 hours charge would be reduced to 26 minutes.

The whole article is here and another reference here.

Update: now up by factor of a 100

Now Kang and Ceder have found that coating each ball with a thin layer of lithium phosphate accelerates this process even further, perhaps because the coating is an excellent conductor of lithium ions, swiftly transporting them to and from the surface of the nanoballs.

If cellphone batteries can be made using the material, they could charge in 10 seconds flat, the researchers calculate (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07853). Bigger batteries for plug-in hybrid electric cars could charge in just 5 minutes - compared with about 8 hours for existing batteries - though this would require a very high-powered charger.

Reference: newscientist.com

I can barely believe its been only 10 days since I create a twitter account and jumped right in! In this span of time, I have found people, conversed, learned of special web sites and analytical tools all made specifically for twitter and to track tweets.

I now see all the various uses that can be applied, and how groups of people can interact. A very interesting thing indeed.

Its everything from the most practical: family members to track a caretaker, to random thoughts, to special interest area updates, and anything else one can imagine a broadcasting platform could carry, in addition to total interactivity in that group.

There are those people out there following and being followed by nearly 40,000 people. Managing this would take (in my mind) software other than the twitter interface, which shows all people you are following is strict chronological order.

Some special tools are being developed to watch for keywords, which might be better suited than following 1,000s of people who speak specifically to things of interest to you on occasion (along with everything else). I just cant imagine reading the tweets of 20,000 – 30,000 people and getting use of that. There are tweet aggregators which can make this process easier.

That being said, twitter is still a new and interesting new social app, and as such, you just never know where the social crowd will take it.

We have been taking advantage of the sun-harvesting planet for eons. Either in living form as food, or as trees and shrubs we cut down and use for fire. Farther down the chain is hydrocarbons as gas and oil.

Our efforts at harvesting sunlight so far could be improved, and there are a few techniques which are being looked at or experimented with.

One sure method is concentrating the solar energy onto a smaller cell. Of course this has (thermal) limits, but it generally a good idea.

One of the biggest problems with solar cells is the light bandwidth in which they convert light to power. Of all the whole color spectrum of light, PV cells are very narrowband in what they can convert. The obvious solution should be to convert much of the incoming light (via prismatic lens or something similar, so that as much light power can be extracted.

This technique could be used for all PV cells whether on Earth or in space.

I have seen Tag Clouds in use for about a year or two now, but I believe they have some interesting potential for a visual reference of content in many more ways than is being seen.

One recent app I saw was based on the bio's of your twitter followers: http://twitpwr.com/5vk/

So, armed with that knowledge, I made my own small app that text can be pasted into. It strips common words like a, an, of, the, by, for and so on.

Give it a try at http://www.centaurihome.net/cloud.php

Apparently, there is a special kind of twitter hiccup that happens on occasion (as it did today) and people lose 1,000s of followings (friends) (it acts like a person just stopped following other people).

This happened today to at least 2 people that I know, and I dont follow very many (yet).

Due to the nice API set out there, it looks like someone has already thought about this, and there is a way to back up your followers and those you follow.

You can also back up your favorites, direct messages, etc., but I imagine the biggest thing is the followers and friends (as it is called on tweetake)

Here is an excerpt from the about page:

Why bother to do this? Many reasons:

• Twitter may lose followers again like it did in June / July
• You may change your Twitter name and want to re-follow the people you were following, and contact the people who were following you
• You may want to refer to an older Tweet - currently Twitter does not keep all of your older Tweets
• You may just like backing things up, ‘just in case’, like us

It creates a CSV file suitable for saving in many types of spreadsheets (or text software if you have the patience to read comma separated values that way

The Kepler mission is due to launch next week (March 6th)

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.

The method used will be the “transit” method (star-crossing orbit). We have seen venus do this: here and here.

Of course, this method wont detect every planet orbiting a star, because the planet must pass directly in front of that star, and given solar systems random alignment compared to ours, the Kepler mission is figuring lower odds for detection. But given the large survey sample (100,000) they feel that the number found will tell us more about how common planets are in other solar systems.

References and more reading:
Keplers Home Page

space.com article

Scientific American Article

My understanding of Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds as I read and use it. In the span of five days, I have seen that followers come and go, but some interesting things happen out there. Of course, it really depends on who you are reading, and the content is only as good as the posters.

Some call it micro-blogging, but that too, depends on your style of blogging, I suppose

It seems many use twitter in conjunction with tinyurl.com to make new blog posts known, and I use it myself for that purpose for specific blog entries.

Of course, on the spot news is a great use, as is instant communications between a group (I dont know how much twitter is currently used in the capacity).

I'll definitely be keeping an eye out though, just to see where things are heading.

This stuff looks pretty wild! Interesting video

This same video has also been getting coverage on CNN's edge of Discovery.

When the information technology guys discover how painful it can be to upgrade their current PC hardware to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 — the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista — they may be tempted to switch to Linux or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac OS X.

Part of the problem is that you can’t install Windows 7 beta directly from Windows XP. Instead, you have to upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later before attempting an install — a process the Channel Web team found to be non-trivial.
Among the scariest quotes in their report:

• “While Microsoft has assured the world that if the hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7, the reality is that is misleading at best.”
• “We’ve almost lost count of the number of blue screens we’ve seen in the CRN Test Center during the Windows 7 evaluation process.”
• “We tried to do the upgrade on an Acer TravelMate, but were stopped in our tracks by Bluetooth driver incompatibilities.”
• “On a series of 3-and-a-half year old ThinkPad T43s, an IBM security processor refused to let the notebooks boot up with Windows 7. We needed to crack open a couple of four-year old desktops … to add memory just to try to get a system image.”
• “Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, “known issues” and unknown issues.”

Bring it on! It cant happen soon enough for me to see legions leaving the crippling M$ world and come to their senses.

The entire article can be read at http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/25/windows-7-trouble-on-the-upgrade-path/