Kevin pointed out that I hadn’t yet posted that I am getting married on my blog.
So I am posting it: I am getting married on October 4th, 2008, to Jonathan Scott Taylor, the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.
I love you, JT.
There have been some rumors flying that Apple’s implementation of Time Machine is going to go hand-in-hand with an implementation of Sun’s ZFS in OSX 10.5 Leopard. I was just reading about ZFS on Wikipedia and came across a very interesting quote on the physical limits of computation. In reply to a question about filling up a theoretical ZFS filesystem without boiling the oceans, ZFS Project Leader Bonwick said:
Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, “Ultimate physical limits to computation.” Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.
To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc2, the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×106 J/kg * 1.4×1021 kg = 3.4×1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”
Everyone seems to love this picture, so I figure I would post it. It’s Feynman doing the sit-back trick, which he knows is the cutest thing he can do and will invariably get him attention.
That’s right folks, it’s not “hih-muh-LAY-uh”! We were corrected several times by the natives.
I just got back from a trek into the Himalayas of Utteranchal via Haridwar and Rishikesh (where the Beatles went to visit the Maharishi). We took the train from Delhi up north and met up with our guide Rajinder at the lovely Camp Hammock.
We stayed overnight there and the following day made our way to Teva village which served as our base camp for the trek up to the 3500m peak of Nagtiba (variously Nagtibba, Nag Tiba, or Nag Tibba, take your pick). Teva sits in a moist deciduous forest, which is apparrently different than a temperate rain forest. All I know is that it was very, very wet, and very, very beautiful.
Anyway more later, but photosets are up on my Flickr page.
I recently launched the LungBlog, a daily compendium of all things lung-cancer related, for the lung cancer foundation on whose board I sit. Yes, I know that “The Bonnie J. Addario A Breath Away From The Cure Foundation” isn’t at all descriptive (I have yet to meet someone who knows what it is upon hearing it) but we are considering changing it to something simpler, easier to type, and MUCH better for search engine optimization, like, oh, I don’t know, THE LUNG CANCER FOUNDATION. 
In any event, take a look!
Cringely has written a fascinating article on Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the history and future of Microsoft. I haven’t read anything like it in a long time. Cringely is usually on point, so it’ll be interesting to see if his history lesson plays out in the way he thinks it does.
The federal government’s response to Katrina was atrocious. Michael Brown of FEMA and Michael Chertoff of DHS both said that they thought that New Orleans was fine after the hurricane because they had read so in the newspaper, and meanwhile the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, and New Orleans Times-Picayune all had “New Orleans catastrophy” stories on Tuesday, August 30th. What the hell newspaper was he reading? The rest of America knew, how did the head of FEMA not know?
Then Bush was playing guitar at a fundraiser in San Diego while people drowned in New Orleans. I just don’t get this guy: if there is a crisis in this country you get off your Presidential ass and go and deal with it. You don’t keep reading My Pet Goat, you don’t go on vacation, you don’t go to a fundraiser — you go and bring the full resources of the federal government to bear on the problem, and you do it immediately. The entire goddamned country was glued to the television and the Net, and everyone was wondering where the hell the government was.
The notion that this was in any way the fault of the local officials is absurd. When an emergency of this magnitude happens across state lines it is then by definition a federal emergency. It is the responsibility of the federal government — specifically the Federal Emergency Management Agency — to step in and manage the frigging federal emergency.
If FEMA isn’t there to swiftly and effectively manage Federal Emergencies then what they hell are they there for? This wasn’t 9/11 where two (large) buildings were struck and the entire local social infrastructure was still left intact, allowing local officials to do their jobs. This was the destruction of an area the size of the continent of Europe. The local law enforcement, just like the people who lived in New Orleans, were destroyed, and we all watched it. They had no resources to bring to bear on the subject because they were underwater.
San Francisco is going to have a disaster of this magnitude. Many people who live here happily ignore this fact. But now that we’ve seen how FEMA responds to emergencies such as this I don’t know how anyone in their right mind could say that a.) this was handled well or b.) that we should have faith that the next time something like this happens that we’ll be prepared.
At the moment it appears we will not be. God help us.
The Mayor of New Orleans outraged at the response of the federal government to the crisis.
To me! Chadfox put up a very nice post wishing me a happy birthday, though he’s not going to be able to join in the festivities. We’re going to Minako Organic (my favorite restaurant in San Francisco, and that is saying a lot) for dinner, and then perhaps to Medjool to hang on the roof deck afterwards, though that place is a major clusterfuck.
Incidentally, Judy, the “daughter” part of the mother-daughter team that runs Minako, is in a rock band. And she works in the music industry.
Actually, neither one of these things is true, but every single review of Minako out there somehow makes mention of Judy’s mellifluous leanings, so I thought I would oblige.
Anyway I have to get back to kernel rebuilds and dæmon building.
