SEA-ME-WE 3

Submarine communications cable cutout from ICPC

I had a large misconception that was cleared up today. I always assumed that the majority of data for international communication was done via satellites. This was very wrong. Come to find out, over 95% of all international data transmissions use submarine communication cables. These are physical cables running along the seafloor. The largest of which is SEA-ME-WE3 coming in at 24,000 miles in length. ISCP has a few great (and slow loading) maps of the major cables running around the globe. For a brief history and current technology of submarine cables, take a look at this PDF, I enjoyed it thoroughly. 

EICAR test file

Considering the number of virii that can disable your antivirus software while appearing to still be working, it is good to have a simple test case to see if you are indeed still getting the protection you think you have. A simple one-liner to do this the following: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Copy and paste that line into a blank file on your computer and your antivirus should flag it and move it to your quarantine folder. You can read more about it here.

While on the topic, I recommend Secunia Personal Software Inspector, which is a free tool to make sure all 3rd party software is up to date at all times with minimal footprint. If you think there is a better version of this kind of software freely available, please let me know and I will check it out.

Lightning!

During an interesting talk on non-geminate recombination rates in organic photovoltaics, we watched lightning strikes in slow motion. Thought I would share even though it is an old video now. If you want to know the link between the two, you should have a chat with Shafig.

Ale to the Chief

I was browsing We the People to just see what people were complaining to the government about when I ran into this response: The White House Honey Porter, brewed by President Obama himself. Anyone up for trying it out? :)

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I knew of Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of Netflix, but I was unaware of how many tools/companies actually utilize the service. As I dug deeper into their HPC services, I became very excited at how easy it was to setup and run computations on their infrastructure. Here is a youtube video they released showing how simple you can obtain and setup servers via amazon to run a parallel namd computation: http://www.youtube.com/embed/YfCgK1bmCjw As a system administrator, I really loved this video. I did not check pricing yet, but at scale I image it has to be cheaper than what we currently do at the academic level (or will be soon). I imagine that over time small computational research groups will start giving all their HPC business needs to companies like amazon considering how easy everything is to maintain. If any group currently uses this service for computational chemistry/biology, please let me know. In the least bit, I do like AWS and think amazon will be an amazing long term stock play because of it.

Space Debris

A few weeks ago I learned about our anti-satellite capabilities from reading an article on the US shooting down (from 2008) one of our own satellites travelling at 17,500 mph! While we have had the technology capable of this since 1985 when the US air force shot down our own P78-1 satellite, it is still very impressive. When you think of tests such as these and those done by the Chinese, along with all the other junk left over from space missions, one has to wonder how much "junk" is orbiting Earth right now. Well, I found an interesting NASA report (page 3 has an amazing figure) from 2009 that claims ~14,000 objects are still in orbit. Even more interesting are the reported missions that have had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid colliding with large chunks of debris.