September 2007 Archive of engeniusBLOG

Geesh! What the heck is going on down in Washington over at the Federal Communications Commission? Ever since broadband-over-powerline (BPL) debuted commercially in field tests a few years ago, radio interference has been plaguing the FCC’s Amateur Radio Service, and a report from NATO says BPL now threatens military radio users, too.

BPL technology, referred to in Europe as powerline carrier (PLC) or powerline telecommunications (PLT), uses the ac power infrastructure to transmit data. Running at speeds in excess of 1 Mbit/s, the physics of RFI is unavoidable; radios are picking up objectionable BPL noise. In some case, receivers in BPL test areas are unable to detect signals from distant stations. They’re simply covered by high levels of broadband noise.

With the emerging popularity of triple play service (voice, video, and Internet), BPL has bandwidth limitations. Nonetheless, the FCC continues to promote it as a viable alternative to cable and ADSL (a...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Greetings from the New York Stock Exchange, home of the seven figure annual bonus, a large fraction of the planet’s financial transactions and one of the most seriously-guarded rooms outside of the military-industrial complex. The relentless security checks, stern-faced guards, and pop-up tank trap barriers (I’m not kidding about this) I had to pass to get in here all underline that the nation’s financial jugular vein is not something to be approached unless you have Serious Business to attend to. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself putting on my Serious Business Suit, getting mug-shot-ed for my Serious Security Badge and being ushered into a Serious Meeting Room (complete with life-sized portraits of long-dead tycoons and stuffed elk heads adorning the oak-paneled walls) to be briefed on how the Green Grid Consortium is teaming up with the US Department of...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

In the 1950s, Boy's Life Magazine featured a how-to article that described a tin-can robot called Gizmo. If you were clever enough to scrounge the requisite parts, innovating when you couldn't find them, the article promised you could build and own a rendition of Gizmo. It would be an honest-to-goodness robot that could move its arms and swivel its head, flash its red Christmas tree eyes, and (hopefully) turn your friends green with envy.

I recall spending many an hour scheming about Gizmo with my next-door neighbor's kid, and endlessly tinkering in my dad's basement workshop. We cobbled together myriad scraps of metal and wood, and a few surplus dc motors, and who knows what else, in the expectation we could replicate the Boy's Life machine.

We were marginally successful. Gizmo came to life, whirring and buzzing, until one of the motor drives let loose, and the whole contraption fell apart. We sure had a lot of fun though before we gave up and move...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

On the very first edition of The Colbert Report (pronounced as "Col-BEAR Re-PORE"), on October 17, 2005 (Oh, my word, nearly two years of genius!) on Comedy Central, Stephen introduced the world to truthiness. He coined the word only minutes before the taping started and it featured in the segment he calls The Wørd, where his statements are comedically criticized by on-screen text that is reality for most of us.

Truthiness, which has been hailed as a wonderful new word, was defined by Stephen as "what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer, as opposed to what reality will support."

A superb example is the kind of statement that comes from the White House, almost on a daily basis. "The surge is working and we can bring back 5000 troops at the end of this month." Sure fe...  -- Click Here to Read More >>