Random Ramblings

From Ed Nisley at Dr. Dobbs Journal:

"Here's a useful number: with electricity priced at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour, an always-on device dissipating 1 watt costs $1 per year. That wall-wart cell-phone charger that you leave plugged in under your desk costs $5 per year and your fancy LCD panel burns $8 a year when it's turned off."

Note that the main issue is if the power transformer is "before" or "after" the power-off switch. Many flat panels have external power supplies (the big black box that is in-line with the power cord), as do many other devices. These consume some amount of power whenever they are plugged in ... Need proof? Touch one. If it's warm or hot to the touch, then electricity must be going through it.

One more science post for the day ... one that I've been meaning to get around to for a while now. This image comes from Scientific Computing magazine, it is the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider (atom smasher) at CERN.

This project is expected to cost nearly $8 BILLION (US$) ... although costs are spread across 34 countries.

I'm all for the progress of science, and I realize we need to do the "out-there" research in order to learn new things and do new science ... but $8B to find out the next smallest sub-atomic particle? That's more than $1 for every man, woman, and child on the entire planet! I don't even want to think about how many people that could feed, how many jobs that could create. At what point do scientists have some obligation to say, "This is good research, but it doesn't need to be done now" ???

FYI: the image comes from http://scientificcomputing.com/

I'm almost embarrassed to mention this, but I hadn't seen this before ... but they have photos of Mars weather! In particular, "dust devils" or mini-tornadoes. This photo is from the Tau Beta Pi link (see previous post), the original is at NASA's site:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/PIADetQuery.html and search for 'dust devils'

From the Bent of Tau Beta Pi (http://www.tbp.org/pages/publications/BENTFeatures/Su06Bell.pdf) ... did you know that dust is one of NASA's top concerns with a permanent presence on the Moon (or Mars)??!?!?!

Seems kinda strange, but it turns out that moon-dust isn't the stuff that poets and songwriters would have us believe. Whereas dust on Earth tends to be organic (and hence soft), moon-dust tends to be shards of rock and powdered glass with lots of jagged edges and sharp points ... a very effective abrasive! They say wiping one's visor is enough to scratch the protective gold layer.