rlcZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG

Like many places in the world, water quality is an issue here in northern New England. Our ocean beaches and rivers are a source of tourist revenue and recreation for locals, so we have town Conservation Commission volunteers taking water samples a few times every week, trying to pinpoint sources of pollution into our streams and onto our seashore.

The water samples are sent to a local lab for analysis, then plans of action are drawn up. Oftentimes, a strategy for abatement involves a homeowner, local farmer, or horse rancher. Farm runoff from animals and defective septic systems are sometimes pinpointed as culprits where high bacterial counts are found.

One of the techniques used to determine if a septic system or treatment plant is polluting a watercourse is the detection of so-called optical brighteners. These dyes are found in water that contains effluent from a home laundry. The optical...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Americans are paying through the nose for gasoline, and a heckuva lot of petrol poker chips now reside in banks in the Middle East. That’s a cause for concern and relief.

A country that’s investing its oil wealth in the American Grand Style is Dubai. Smack dab in the middle of the Middle East turmoil, Dubai shapes up as a clone of glitzy America. Although the little oil-rich country churns out a quarter of a million barrels of oil a day, Dubai is attracting tourists so it can derive its entire gross domestic product from non-oil sources.

The plan is to host 15 million tourists by 2010. A theme park alone is anticipated to pull a few hundred thousand visitors a day. Here's the promotional pitch, straight from Dubai's web site.

"Dubailand is set to be the ultimate entertainment and tourism destination in the world. Committed to ent...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

If you’re like most folks, you probably subscribe to an e-mail reflector or two. My subscriptions include engineering digests, but I also receive e-mails about dogs, British cars, toy trains, ecology, hiking, and conservation.

The e-mails in these reflectors sometimes make me wonder whether the senders have computers equipped with spelling and grammar checkers. As a writer, I've come to expect that when ideas are exchanged for public reading, there should be some minimal conformance to the rules of grammar. Stumbling across writing blunders, such as the use of the pronoun "your" instead of the contraction "you're," irks me.

Lately I’m seeing the use of "a couple" instead of "a couple of." Now, the word “couple” is followed by “of” and a plural noun, in which case it's a plural statement. For example, you would say, "There are a couple of cars in the garage." (In informal uses, ac...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The world's got a heroin problem, and US cell phone companies are part of it. Thanks in part to top-notch cellular communications, Osama bin Laden is hauling in cash with which to buy expensive and sophisticated (presumably nuclear) weapons.

Opium production is skyrocketing. A report released by the Bush administration reveals that Afghanistan's crop is now at a record high, with nearly 6000 tons of opium produced annually. With failed efforts to eradicate growing and production, Taliban-supported Afghani growers are sourcing 90% of the world's heroin.

According to former NATO supreme allied commander General James L Jones, it's the drug runners who usually engage in combat with US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. "They make sure the roads stay open, and they get to where they want to go, whether it's through Pakistan, Iran, up through Russia, or all the known trade routes."

A recent World Bank report, as well as a United Nations Office on Drug...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The personal computer is a remarkable piece of evolutionary engineering, isn’t it? The latest PC on my desk, clocking its Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 processor at over 2 GHz, fills my bill for fast Web surfing and Photoshop artwork manipulation, and even makes short work of small circuit simulations. Best of all, it set me back less than a kilobuck. By all commercial standards, a PC like mine is rather up to date and state-of-the-art.

Or is it?

Just like the 8088-equipped personal computers most folks cut their teeth on back in the 1980s, the Achilles Heel of this machine is its rotating machinery. The box is endowed with a 3.5-in. floppy disk (for office-to-basement Sneaker Net runs), a CD-ROM/DVD drive that sounds like a banshee at midnight when it revs up, and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive.

The Seagate drive, spinning at 7200 rpm, offers huge capacity, low head seek times, and splendidly fast transfer rates. I must admit I get an indescribable sort...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

About to pay my barber, I dug into my pocket and pulled out my money clip. It was stuffed with a needlessly bulky collection of one-dollar bills. My barber said he could use singles, so he exchanged my haircut for a wad of bills, and I got a crisp $10 note in return as well.

While this bit of money laundering was going on, my barber quipped that our high-finance exchange was like Monopoly -- adding that the venerable Parker Brothers board game is now electronic. Players bank their stash using mag-stripe plastic cards, he said.

What's this? Monopoly has gone e-Monopoly? For a graying gamer like me, who would play Monopoly with traditional little wooden houses and hotels (even plastic ones) and lots of multi-colored paper Monopoly cash tucked under the Park Place and Boardwalk end of the board, this was nothing short of incredible.

Wincing to myself (those of you who regularly read my Editorials know I like antiques and old stuff), I was reminded how pervasive ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

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