Squirrel lights

adj Describes something the speaker doesn’t understand, and hopes nobody does for the sake of his/her ego

The world generated 2TW of electrical power on average in 2005 [1].  Each (unobstructed, clear) square meter of the earth’s surface is illuminated by around 1.4 kW of solar energy [2].  Replacing the world’s electrical generation with solar sources would then require at least 2TW / (1.4 kW/m^2) = 1.4 billion sq. m = 1400 sq. km (equivalent to a square 37km on a side) worth of ideally efficient solar panels with unobstructed solar light.

With realistic panel efficiency and atmospheric effects like clouds are taken into effect, this can still suggest a rough order of magnitude estimate.  A 50% efficient solar panel in a desert would need to be about the size of Rhode Island to supply enough power for the entire 2005 world.

As always, if my data or my calculations contain errors, please bring them to my attention

[1] http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/electricitygeneration.html
[2] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/ManicaPiputbundit.shtml

Wickets!

Meritorious fishes of the deep?

Evanescent taco splinges the air in a frock -

A gradual degradation of the deep

won’t keep Al Gore off the porch.

Twelve?  Today is the day of  government converter boxes!

Whyfor art thine fluxen over who?

Whither which talcum boat hoards howl?

Fiddlefart, for it is time for soup!

Get off my lawn Frog,

For some night is betwixt your face!

Anyone else have nominations for this category?

When I was but a freshman in college I wrote this.  Some friends remembered it recently, so I dug it up, cleaned it out a little bit, and here it is.

Andromeda
Kevin Sorbo strikes dramatic poses, wandering the galaxy teaching conservatives how to love again and building up a liberal government based on unicorns and rainbows and happy munchkins. Only, some people in the galaxy just don’t feel the love so he whacks them with a big metal stick. And his computer’s in love with him. Or something. What a guy.

Babylon 5
It is the year 2259.  Space liberals with spinning heads, who live in a spaceborn liberal cesspool, stick it to some mean old Space Republican who takes away their civil liberties.

Battlestar Galactica
If you’re like me, then you probably wonder what it would be like if you took the entire cast of West Wing, gave them a bucket of ’shrooms and some blow, and reshot the whole series in space.  Guess what?  Our prayers were answered, and we call it Battlestar Galactica.

Blake’s 7
Robin Hood in space, with triangles. Lots and lots of big, green triangles. Features the diabolically evil Space Commander Travis and firefighting marshmallows.

Doctor Who
A doctor of questionable qualification in an ugly suit travels through time in a telephone box, battling wave after punishing wave of robots who wield terrifying spinning arms.

Earth: Final Conflict
So apparently there are these two races of aliens who are the flip side of the coin or opposite sides of the duct tape or something who duke it out on Earth for some reason, with only a soap opera star to fight for the forces of good.

MacGyver
Richard Dean Anderson foils bad guys using a nuke he built with only a flashlight, a paperclip and a gum wrapper.

Odyssey 5
The Earth explodes for no reason while a space shuttle crew is in space, so they go back in time and film nude scenes for Showtime ™.

The Outer Limits
A rotating cast teaches us dubious lessons about how time travel can really screw up your life and stuff.

Quantum Leap
Scott Bakula travels through time, righting wrongs and making out.

Sliders
An arrogant physics student, his girlfriend, a cranky college professor, and some random guy with an ugly car find new and completely different ways of getting themselves screwed over every week thanks to Science ™.

Space 1999
An intrepid crew of white men with flared pants and sideburns explore the galaxy on the moon after a nuclear accident causes earthquakes in Yugoslavia as their token minority and female underlings exchange dramatic looks.

Star Trek
Grown men, women and aliens travel the cosmos in pajamas searching for new terminology and new ethical conundra, boldly spreading equal opportunity across the galaxy.

Star Trek: the Animated Series
Grown men, women and aliens travel the cosmos in pajamas searching for new terminology and new ethical conundra, boldly spreading equal opportunity across the galaxy.

Star Trek: Deep Space 9
After sitting around for a few seasons doing nothing, grown men, women and aliens travel the cosmos in pajamas searching for new terminology and new ethical conundra, boldly spreading equal opportunity across the galaxy.

Star Trek: Enterprise
Grown men, women and aliens travel the cosmos in pajamas searching for new terminology and new ethical conundra, boldly spreading equal opportunity across the galaxy.

Star Trek: the Next Generation
Grown men, women and aliens travel the cosmos in pajamas searching for new terminology and new ethical conundra, boldly spreading equal opportunity across the galaxy.

Star Trek: Voyager (aka Star Trek: Lost in Space)
Grown men, women and aliens travel the cosmos in pajamas searching for new terminology and new ethical conundra, boldly spreading equal opportunity across the galaxy.

Stargate SG1
MacGyver, two geeks and a pro wrestler explore the universe using an elaborate system of squealing guinea pigs and sideways swimming pools, saving the Earth repeatedly in cliffhanger season finales.

The Twilight Zone
For the first time, William Shatner is allowed to appear on TV.  ‘Nuff said.

Fig. 1
Source:  http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive accessed 31 Jan, 2008.

Here is a first draft mockup of a potential playback part of the UI. Notes:

• Most of the search & browse etc. magic will appear in a sidebar when the button labelled “Browse >” is clicked.
• I haven’t thought through the listview text and formatting yet, but I’m open for suggestions

Also: as I post more of these I’m gonna want comments, dammit!

For the sake of organizing my own thoughts, here is an attempt to distill the wordy audio player-related posts I made last year into a draft of a clearer set of goals.  It is still fairly undigested for now, I hope it will help to bring focus to the next stage of brainstorming and prototyping.

Here a draft , in no particular order:

• Change assumptions about the roles of specific metadata fields:
  • Tracks ought to be incidental signposts within more interesting metadata groupings
    • Current players tend to [over]emphasize tracks as the only playback atoms in the UI
  • Use accurate terms in UI, and not 1337 h1pst0r mp3 slang
    • Please, ’song’ -> ‘track’.  ‘Song’ is a logical subset of ‘track’.  Music tracks aren’t necessarily songs.  Audio tracks aren’t necessarily music.
• Minimize disruptions to the user workflow with smarter shuffling, less time/fewer interruptions spent requesting music
  • More flexibly take advantage of metadata as simple basis for user-configured track grouping
    • “Random track” prevents appropriate track grouping, and “random album” is too rigid
    • Shuffled track grouping needs to be configurable, based at least on metadata rules; i.e., group Pink Floyd albums and classical pieces, but not Britney Spears
    • This would require good metadata to work well.
  • Try to imitate patterns in user playback requests; when shuffling, find track groupings with metadata similar to current playback [to avoid jarring style shifts] and/or to recent requests [to try to match user 'mood'].
• Be a team player as a desktop component - make it easy (e.g. through d-bus) for other applications to request playback
  • There ought to be a freedesktop.org “standard” for this..
• Don’t reimplement general desktop infrastructure features, notably w.r.t.
  • Indexing; use beagle, tracker, strigi et al through xesam
  • File playback; use gstreamer
• Maintain directed scope of application.  Monolithic do-everything applications are difficult to integrate nicely into a desktop.  Dammit, Jim, I’m a music playback app, not:
  • A tagger
  • An alarm clock
  • A portable music player manager
  • A wikipedia browser
  • A CD ripper
  • But not really sure about web radio etc…

I’ve been thinking by myself for too long about this, so please leave feedback and set me straight

I’m pleased to see there has remained some residual interest about the music player posts I made last year. Last summer, my friend Evan and I discussed the idea further and wrote some prototype code, but found that certain desirable pieces of the desktop infrastructure (notably xesam, but also improvements to existing components such as gvfs) were not yet mature enough for serious use.

Rest assured that I haven’t forgotten about this project, and more or less still hate iTunes. Progress since the summer on those desktop infrastructure projects gives me hope that it might become possible to begin more serious prototyping work later this year. If that happens, then I will dump my ideas here and hope for some guidance from everybody who reads this. Yes, that’s right - all 4 of you