HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD

We all knew knew that this was going to happen and Sony won the format war. Toshiba threw in the towel and took HD-DVD off the market today as reported by most major news.

The format war, often compared to the Betamax-VHS battle in the 1980s and then Sony's venture into the Mini-Disc products. I found them to be excellent but the support for them did not happen when the MP3 revolution took the public by storm.

Hollywood studios had initially split their alliances between the two camps, meaning only certain films would play on any one DVD machine and that hurt both of the companies in the beginning.

In addition to Wal-Mart, consumer electronics chain Best Buy and online video rental company Netflix Inc also recently signed up to the Blu-ray camp.


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My new book!

I started it today... Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

Thought for the day...

'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true science' Albert Einstein Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

House, Nursing Assistant!

Thanks to Mac for letting me publish this article. 

House, Nursing Assistant

 

House is a reasonably intelligent television show featuring the eponymous lead as a Byronic hero who is never sacked despite his drug abuse, ill manners, television watching, and video gaming, all on the job, because he develops brilliant solutions to apparently impossible medical problems. 

 

Where House breaks down is its unreality, which is not a criticism because this is a television show.  In House the few nurses do things on computer screens and are never seen giving patient care.  Patients suffer seizures or coronary occlusions only when a team of physicians happens to be in the room.  The hospital in which House works has no admissions staff, nursing assistants, cleaner-uppers, security guards, or bulletin boards.  Each fictional doctor enjoys a spacious, glass-walled office which any real-life physician can only envy, and when said physician needs a crash cart, a suture tray, or a specific medicine it is immediately available.

 

What if House were more like a real hospital?

 

House, Nursing Assistant.  House is fired for having a drug problem, even though he saves lives.

 

House, Pharmacist.  House is fired for being rude, although he saves lives.

 

House, Cleaning Staff.  House is fired for pausing thirty seconds to watch a bit of soap opera on a patient's television while tidying his fiftieth or so room of his shift, even though skilled and science-based hygiene and maintenance save lives.

 

House, Hospital Security.  House, after wrestling with drunks most of his shift, is fired for playing a video game on his watch at four in the morning although his presence in a creepy world saves lives.

 

House, R.N.  House, after helping deliver a baby in E.R., giving resuscitation to a heart-attack victim, getting coughed on by 'flu patients, barfed on by someone with food poisoning, and supervising the care of dozens of other patients, all without lunch or even a potty break, is fired for telling an career FEMA recipient complaining about the formaldehyde in his free trailer that he doesn't even know what formaldehyde is and why doesn't he just open the windows if he doesn't like the new-car smell?

 

House, Admissions Clerk.  House, after years of loyal service to the same hospital doing his part to help save lives, is fired for not learning Spanish rapidly enough.

 

Short season, huh?  And now, back to Flipping Homezillas Off the Island.

 

-30-

 

Religous Choices...

We went to a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday and it was interesting. The ceremony and tradition in the service was just amazing and rightly so after over 2000+ years to perfect it. I have never been a Jewish Temple nor have I seen any of the accouterments that it has. The service was about 2.5 hours long with many of the prayers sang and spoken in Hebrew. I was very impressed by the Scripture leader and how fluently he spoke from the Torah. This stirred some questions in me.

It got me to thinking that I, being a Christian, believe that in order for em to go to Heaven, i have to believe in Jesus and accept him as my personal savior, thus enabling me to go to Heaven when i die. The Jewish people do not believe that Jesus was the embodiment of God and thus from a Christian point of view, will not go to Heaven even though one was started from the other.

Christians worship Jesus and pray to Him of God. Jews pray to God only. Now this thought may go against Christianity, but we both worship the same deity God, only in a different aspect. So they do not believe in Jesus, that is not their religion. The believe in God and that is their way to Heaven. Ok. No Problem for me. I just wonder if me believing in Jesus and them believing in God; do we not all go to the same Heaven? Is their religion any better than Christianity. Or is it worse. If that is what they believe and that is their faith, then is it not correct? Our Faith is correct for our belief. Why are we so judgmental of their religion if it initially spawned ours? Was Jesus not a Jew? I guess that it all goes back to the Christian Bible, not the Torah.

I hope that someone out will enter into my discussion on this. I am very interested in their subject and welcome all comments from Christian and Jew alike. It just all made me wonder about the differentiation on this subject and why it is the way it is.

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This is for a good cause...

Many years ago i participated in SETI@Home. I just found out about a project called Folding@Home. Here is a description from their website:

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

What have we done so far?

We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, on our Awards page, or go directly to our Results page.

Want to learn more?

Click on the links on the left for downloads or more information. You can also download our Executive Summary, which is a PDF suitable for distribution. Also, you can learn more by watching recent seminars (Stanford BMI ; Xerox PARC). One can also help by donating funds to the project, via Stanford University.

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Little Ice Age Part 2?

Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age

A typical sunspot compared to the size of the earth. Sunspots have all but vanished in recent years.

Henrik Svensmark explains the SKY experimen

Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages.

But will it happen again?

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to "stock up on fur coats." Sorokhtin, who calls man's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond.

Observational data seems to support the claims -- or doesn't contradict it, at least. According to data from Britain's Met Office, the earth has cooled very slightly since 1998. The Met Office says global warming "will pick up again shortly." Others aren't so sure.

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes. According to Patterson. we shouldn't be surprised by a solar link. "The sun [is] the ultimate source of energy on this planet," he says.

Such research dates back to 1991, when the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that world temperatures over the past several centuries correlated very closely with solar cycles. A 2004 study by the Max Planck Institute found a similar correlation, but concluded the timing was only coincidental, as the solar variance seemed too small to explain temperature changes.

However, researchers at DMI continued to work, eventually discovering what they believe to be the link. The key factor isn't changes in solar output, but rather changes in the sun's magnetosphere A stronger field shields the earth more from cosmic rays, which act as "seeds" for cloud formation. The result is less cloud cover, and a warming planet. When the field weakens, clouds increases, reflecting more light back to space, and the earth cools off.

Recently, lead researcher Henrik Svensmark was able to experimentally verify the link between cosmic rays and cloud formation, in a cloud chamber experiment called "SKY" at the Danish National Space Center. CERN plans a similar experiment this year.

Even NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies -- long the nation's most ardent champion of anthropogenic global warming -- is getting in on the act. Drew Shindell, a researcher at GISS, says there are some "interesting relationships we don't fully understand" between solar activity and climate.

From Daily Tech Science Blog.


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Thought for today...

You must not depend upon the world, and not upon men, and not upon yourself, but only and alone upon God: for a human being can of himself do nothing. !Postscript! Soren Kierkegaard 1846 Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Postscript - a summation

God does not think, He Creates; God does not exist, He is eternal.
Man thinks and exists, and existence separates thought and being,
holding them apart from one another in succession...

Subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is reality.

Soren Kierkegaard 1846 "Postscript: The Subjective Thinker"

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Monaco - What do you want from me (UK version)

This is the video version that i remember the most.

Monaco - What do you want from me (US version)

I do not remember this version of the song. It is perhaps one of my favorite songs from Hooke.

Revenge - Pineapple Face

Peter Hooke from New Order. This was the jamm in college back in Nacadoches Texas. I have all of Revenge on CD. Good Music still today!

Dave Gahan - Saw Something

This is the first track on the album (Hourglass) It is a good track and it really impressed me. The rest of the album is very good as well.

Dave Gahan - Kingdom

This is the new single from the album Hourglass(2007) I saw it last night at the gym. The video is neat and i like the production. The album is very good, kind of like Depeche Mode and other styles also with very clean audio production.

Thought for today...

Christinity has declared itself to be the eternal essential truth which has come into being in time. !Postscript! Soren Kierkegaard 1846 Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Civic Duty...

In this time of over the cell voting, it is good and right to go out and personally cast your vote in your state's Primary Election, I did today and it felt good. If 54 million people voted in the National Elections; it would be amazing what would happen. I can understand why more people will vote for the American Who is going to be your next dancing idol while sitting at home. They feel like they are doing something with tangible results. The state primaries get the same results. You can see who wins that state. Go vote.

If you do not vote, then you have no ground to bitch about the state of affairs. You did not make your voice heard, you might say you like what the person is doing and how the country is running but when the crap hits the fan you complain and people should not pay you any mind at all. You spout your Rhetoric but you did not take you chance when you had it and when it counted. You have not leg to stand on in my opinion, yet, you will talk up a person when they are doing well. Go and use your Civic Responsibility and make your voice heard!

I guess that you can tell that I am Republican and I endorse Senator John McCain for President.
I agree with many of the issues that he talks about. I think that he has been in Washington for many years and is about as transparent as they come with all the corruption. I see McCain as a down the middle candidate and not on the Far Right or Left on Issues. He has strong stances that i believe in. He has been in Washington DC for many years and i think that he will lead this country in the right direction and keep the military strong and we need that to help protect the USA. he will deal with the illegal immigrant issue that plagues our nation.

A vote for McCain is a vote taken away from Obama!

A constitutional Obamination!

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Thought for today...

'The Alpha and Omega of military outsourcing.' pg353 'Blackwater' Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

New lakeview red stunt

Yesterday. Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

Bike Ride...

Well yesterday we got in a 12.82 mile ride on Lake View 1&2.  It was a great ride and they have done some more work to those trails and we found several new “Red” sections to the trails that had some crazy new stunts. Our total ride time was about 1’45 minutes. We hooked up with some people there that had never ridden those trails so it was a good time for them as well. My knees are very sore today but it is worth it. Not too bad after being off for 3 weeks.  I kept up cardio in the gym where I work out and I had already ridden 16.2 miles this week so I am very happy with all of that.   Have a good day…

 

RMStringer

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You have no conscience and it seems you never will - Cyberaktif

 

Morning Ride!!

I am off to ride at Pocahontas Park! We are going to ride Lake View 1&2 which will be a 12 mile ride. It is my first ride in a month due to all the traveling that we have been doing…I can’t wait!

 

 

RMStringer

********************

IMBA Member: Dec 2007