About 300 people crowded into the Alpine Community Center last night for Dianne Jacob’s Town Forum on Sempra’s Sunrise PowerLink project. Several good points were made by 40 people who stood up to speak.

Sempra does not need Sunrise PowerLink to serve San Diego residents: There is already a network of power lines running along our U.S.-Mexico border from El Centro which could be improved to take additional loads. The new power lines will cost rate payers $2 billion. For that money we can buy a lot of rooftop solar panels. Sempra claimed it had done environmental impact studies, which in fact it had not done, and has changed its route to go through environmentally sensitive areas without disclosing those changes of plans. Several of the area’s worst fires in 2003 and 2007 were started by SDG&E arcing power lines, and we will CERTAINLY be imperiled by at least one major fire per decade by this project if built (14 people died and 2,000 homes were lost in 2007). The power lines themselves will prevent arial water drops on wildfires 1000 feet on either side during heavy winds, thus ensuring fires not started by arcing power lines will not be safely fought.

Thank you to Dianne Jacob, our stalwart County Supervisor, for leading the fight against this project which appears to be designed solely to serve Sempra investor interests, not the interests of San Diego County residents.

Earlier this week, the humble computer mouse celebrated its 40th birthday. While surprisingly little has changed since Doug Engelbart, an engineer at Stanford Research Institute, in Palo Alto, CA, first demonstrated the mouse to a skeptical crowd in San Francisco, we may have already seen a few glimpses of the future of computer interfaces. If so, over the next few years, the future of the computer interface will likely revolve around touch.

Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone, the touch screen has gained recognition as a practical interface for computers. In the coming years, we may see increasingly useful variations on the same theme. A couple of projects, in particular, point the way toward interacting more easily with miniature touch screens, as well as with displays the size of walls.

One problem with devices like the iPhone is that users’ fingers tend to cover up important information on the screen. Yet making touch screens much larger would make a device too bulky to slip discreetly into a pocket.

A project called nanoTouch, developed at Microsoft Research, tackles the challenges of adding touch sensitivity to ever-shrinking displays. Patrick Baudisch and his colleagues have added touch interaction to the back of devices that range in size from an iPod nano to a watch or a pendant. The researchers’ concept is for a gadget to have a front that is entirely a display, a back that is entirely touch sensitive, and a side that features buttons.

To make the back of a gadget touch sensitive, the researchers added a capacitive surface, similar to those used on laptop touch pads. In one demonstration, the team shows that the interface can be used to play a first-person video game on a screen the size of a credit card. In another demo, the device produces a semitransparent image of a finger as if the device were completely see-through.

When a transparent finger or a cursor is shown onscreen, people can still operate the device reliably, says Baudisch, who is a part-time researcher at Microsoft Research and a professor of computer science and human-computer interaction at the Hasso Plattner Institute at Postdam University, in Germany.

Details of the device will be presented at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Boston next April. The researchers tested four sizes of square displays, measuring 2.4 inches, 1.2 inches, 0.6 inches, and 0.3 inches wide. They found that people could complete tasks at roughly the same speed using even the smallest display, and that they made about the same number of errors using all sizes of the device. Furthermore, the back-of-the-screen prototypes performed better than the smallest front-touch device.

Baudisch is encouraged by the results and is in the process of establishing guidelines for building rear-touch interfaces into tiny devices. “Envision the future where you buy a video game that’s the size of a quarter . . . and you wear electronic pendants,” he says.

Jeff Han, founder of a startup called Perceptive Pixel, based in New York, says that Baudisch’s concepts are impressive, but he’s more interested in using touch technology on large displays. He has already had some success: he has supplied wall-size touch screens to a number of U.S. government agencies and several news outlets. In fact, his company’s touch screens were used by news anchors during the November presidential election to show viewers electoral progress across the country.

Traditionally, large touch screens have been built in the same way as smaller ones, making them very expensive to create. Han’s displays take advantage of a physical phenomenon called total internal reflection: light is shone into an acrylic panel, which acts as the display and is completely contained within the material. When a finger or another object comes in contact with the surface, light scatters out and is detected by cameras positioned just behind the display. Because a thin layer of material covers the acrylic, the scattered light also depends on the amount of pressure that is applied to the display.

In a paper presented in October at the User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, in Monterey, CA, Han’s colleague Philip Davidson describes software that takes touch beyond the surface, using pressure to add another dimension to a screen.

Davidson created software that recognizes how hard a person is pressing a surface. If a user presses hard enough on an image of, say, a playing card and slides it along the display to another card, it will slide underneath. Additionally, if a person presses hard on one corner of an object on the screen, the opposite corner pops up, enabling the user to slide things underneath it. This provides a way to prevent displays from getting too cluttered, Davidson says.

However, Davidson also notes that pressure sensitivity should not make the device uncomfortable to use, and he has studied the natural fatigue that a person feels when she presses on a display and drags an object from one side to the other. The new pressure-sensitive features are expected to ship by the middle of next year, Davidson says.

Mark Ryan, of Kingfisher, Okla,. makes his way north on Highway 530, south of Conway, Washington. Ryan, his horse and a packmule, started out from Oklahoma on June 2nd to visit a friend in Washington state. Ryan said he always asks permission to camp on private property every night and usually gets it. Ryan’s horse is on its sixth set of horseshoes and his mule on its third.

Video clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU7qy7NMdNk 

Balboa Park Website lists December Nights Events

 Balboa Park is offering a host of new attractions at this year’s December Nights open house festival, December 5 & 6, 2008. They are expecting more than 100,000 people each day, so check the site for shuttle and parking options. This year the Bon Temps Social Club is hosting a stage featuring danceable local Cajun, zydeco and country bands. On Friday the BTSC stage will present Bayou Brothers, Slapjazz & Friends, Three Chord Justice, and Tim Cook’s TexMex. On Saturday you can enjoy Louisiana Saturday Night, robin Henkel, a zydeco dance lesson with Greg Benusa, San Diego Cajun Playboys, Billy Lee and the Swamp Critters, Slapjazz, Judy Taylor and Wild Oats, and Theo and The Zydeco Patrol. There will be literally hundreds of other things to do and see at the event. Best of all it is free. December Nights runs 5-10 pm on Friday, and noon-10pm on Saturday.

President-Elect's Website.

A new Website launched a couple days after the election has been getting thousands of hits. It currently features news video of major news, a Presidential blog, general information about all of the cabinet position, and a form page for seekers of jobs with the new administration. It will soon feature major position papers and plans for the new administration. Address is www.change.gov.

WASHINGTON – An emotional Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reveled Wednesday in Barack Obama’s election, calling it an “extraordinary step forward” for the nation.A child of the segregated deep South who became the highest-ranking African-American woman ever in American government and was once considered a potential Republican presidential nominee, Rice called the Democratic president-elect “inspirational” and said his victory was proof of America’s promise.

“This was an exercise in American democracy of which Americans across the political spectrum are justifiably proud,” she said.

Thank God the election is finally over!  Maybe now we can move forward in a new direction. And the rancor of the campaign can fade into memory. (Maybe. For a little while.) 

John McCain gave one heck of a gracious concession speech which will help tremendously in healing the political division in this country. John McCain is an American hero, even in his defeated campaign. This was a side of John McCain I frankly missed throughout the campaign: gracious, noble, statesman-like. If that part of his nature had been revealed more during the campaign, the outcome may have been much different. When it comes right down to it, all Republicans and Democrats love this nation unconditionally, and have far more in common than not. 

Few Americans are satisfied with the current state of affairs: an economic collapse of several of the largest American banking institutions, weakened consumer confidence and spending, stock market decline by about 40% over past year, the largest national debt in American history without a plan to pay it back, an unemployment crisis added to the default of retirement programs, higher demands for an affordable healthcare program, two wars without a clear objective for “victory,” damaged relationships with other countries in the world, and looming threats from various unfriendly countries and rogue factions. Things are pretty screwed up.

Maybe no one American has the resume to solve all of these complex issues, but I do believe we have a new President who can inspire, bring together the brightest minds and best problem-solvers, and lead our government out of the ditch we’re currently stuck in.  As Americans we have to believe there is a better tomorrow awaiting us. I welcome Barack Obama as President of the United States of America!

In case you have misplaced your voter’s pamphlet, or would like to have the various propositions read to you from an audio file online, check out the California Voter guide at this link:

http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/title-sum/prop5-title-sum.htm 

Thanks, Eric, for the tip.

Durst National Debt Clock...in "better" times.

According to the Telegraph.co.uk Website, the U.S. National Debt Clock has too few digits to measure the current state of affairs. The clock’s owner, the Durst Organization, is expected to add a pair of additional placeholders next year, making “it capable of recording a quadrillion dollars of debt.” (See “Financial crisis: US debt clock runs out of numbers,” October 9, 2008.)

Invented and bankrolled by New York real estate developer Seymour Durst, the 11×26-foot National Debt Clock was erected in 1989. When it first was plugged in, the odometer-style clock whirred furiously as the national debt rose by $13,000 a second. Often the last few digits increased so fast they were just a blur. And at one point in the mid-1990s, the debt was rising so fast the clock’s computer crashed. 

Under the presidency of Bill Clinton and a push for a balanced budget, though, the clock started ticking in the opposite direction, shaving off roughly $30 a second towards the turn of the century. Durst’s son felt that was “sending the wrong message at [that] point” and the clock was shut down until 2002 when the “fiscally conservative” administration of George W. Bush reversed course and brought meaning back to the ticker.

Look to the west around 7:30 and you might catch a view similar to the photo above of a Delta II rocket with a COSMO-SkyMed 3 earth observation satellite in the night sky. Exact launch time is 19:28:21 on October 24, 2008. Caption for photographer Brian Webb’s image above (taken November 8, 1997) reads:

“The Delta II carries the Iridium 38, 39, 40, 41, and 43 satellites into orbit as its sunlit contrail is suspended in the dusk sky. The webmaster took this photo during the late portion of the first stage burn just before main engine cut-off (MECO). The bright white dot on the right is the planet Venus.”

The rocket’s trail will likely appear differently depending on where you view it.

Additional information: http://www.spacearchive.info/vafbsked.htm