Your Phone Can Fly You to the Moon

Ever since my fourth grade teacher explained to me and my classmates that our classroom computer was hundreds of times faster than the computer which sent a man to the moon, I've been fascinated by how NASA has affected technological innovation in the U.S. and the world. Living in DC I have the ability to take a short walk and see the spacecraft which actually orbited the moon and brought our boys safely back to earth, and I'm inspired by it every time. After seeing Apollo 13 again a few weeks ago, I've come to realize that the space program, in particular the Apollo missions, has been a powerful inspiration for me in my pursuit of engineering craft. To put it mildly, I'm a huge fan.

Last month I entered the world of 24/7 internet access by buying a fancy phone, the Motorola Droid. Remembering the words of my fourth grade teacher, I became curious to know how my tiny phone compares with the computer that was used onboard the Apollo 11 moon mission. I knew my phone would be many times more powerful, but the nerd in me wanted to see some actual numbers. So here, for your enjoyment (if you're into this kindof thing), is a comparison of my phone and the Apollo 11 AGC.

The Apollo 11 AGC vs. the Motorola Droid 

Clock Speed
Apollo 11 AGC: 1.024 MHz
Motorola Droid: 600 Mhz
Difference: The Droid has 586 times the clock speed of the Apollo 11 AGC.

Memory
Apollo 11 AGC: 72KB ROM / 4KB RAM
Motorola Droid: 512MB ROM / 256MB RAM
Difference: The Motorola Droid has 7,282 times the ROM and 65,536 times the RAM of the Apollo 11 AGC.

Storage
Apollo 11 AGC: None
Motorola Droid: 16GB
Difference: The Motorola Droid has 16 Gigabytes of digital storage space. The Apollo 11 AGC had none; everything was stored in ROM.

Power Consumption
Apollo 11 AGC: 70 W
Motorola Droid: 740 mW (roughly, while making a call)
Difference: The Apollo 11 AGC consumed 95 times more power than the Motorola Droid.

Weight
Apollo 11 AGC: 70.1 lb
Motorola Droid: 5.96 oz
Difference: The Apollo 11 AGC weighed 188 times more than the Motorola Droid.

By the way don't worry, even if you don't have one of those fancy schmancy phones, you've still got the AGC licked. There's no way the AGC could have handled a phone call.

References:
Motorola Droid Specs
Wikipedia: Apollo Guidance Computer
Download Squad: How Powerful was the Apollo Guidance Computer?
IET: Apollo Guidance Computer Revisited

Quotes: Happiness, Economists, and Anonymous Attacks

"Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." Thomas Szasz

"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." Laurence J. Peter

"No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously." Jim Lehrer

Top 5 Things Which Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. Not only is Obama's approval rating now under 50%, only 50% of the U.S. population says they prefer him to George W. Bush. 44% say they'd rather have 'ol GW back in the driver's seat. How quickly we forget.

2. In February, two Pennsylvania judges plead guilty to receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks from two privately run youth detention centers for convicting teenagers and sending them there. More than 500 juveniles may have been wrongly convicted or sentenced, without representation, by one of these judges.

3. The DC Catholic Church has threatened to end its social service contracts if the District passes pending legislation to legalize same-sex marriage. The church currently manages one third of DC's homeless shelters. While this is a complex issue and I understand the church's concerns about the bill, this is the most horrendous way to express them I can imagine. It reminds me of that time Jesus said, "Sell your possessions and give to the poor - unless of course your city is going to let gay people marry."

4. President Obama, the man who revolutionized the use of technology in political campaigning and is the fourth most-popular user on Twitter with 2.8 million followers, has never tweeted. Hilarious.

5. The remarkable, tenacious bravery of my two sisters: Anna and Jessica, the artist and the heroine.

A Couple Blogger Tips

1. Judging from how many people have commented on my weird post times (I like to post early in the day, say 7am), it seems not many Blogger users know you can schedule posts. Just insert a future time/date and Blogger will automatically publish your post for you. Here are simple instructions for how to make it happen.

2. I recently found a widget for posting a link to a random post from my blog. Check it out under the "Search" heading to your left. If you would like this on your blog, you can find it here.

Up a Creek

© 2009 The Journal News, printed with permission from Matt Davies

A Little Christmas Irony

1. Dude watches A Charlie Brown Christmas every year.
2. This year ABC cuts scenes from the cartoon so they can have more time for commercials and make more money - the very thing Charlie Brown hates about the Christmas season.
3. Dude writes open letter to ABC on his LiveJournal.
4. Letter goes viral.
5. Dude adds popup video ad (which looks a lot like, well, a commercial) to his open letter so he can make money off of it. Good grief!

I know this just slathers on more irony, but I own the DVD and the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Erin and I cozy up on the couch every year to see Charlie Brown direct the Christmas play with no commercials to complain to Lucy about. It just isn't Christmas until you've heard Linus recite Luke 2. Or for that matter, until you've heard George Bailey scream "Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!"

America Loves Prison

This is one of the biggest issues America faces and yet I feel it's also one of the least discussed. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prison population. China is in second with 14% of the world's prison population. No other country in the world has more of its citizens in prison than the U.S.; one in every 31 American adults are in prison, on parole, or on probation. A black man born in the U.S. today has a one in three chance of going to prison. Thirteen percent of the American black male population cannot vote because of a felony conviction. The average prison sentence is five years. It costs Americans roughly $24,000 a year to keep one inmate in prison.

All this data and more are presented in the following well-crafted infographic. (Call me what you will, I'm sucker for good infographics.)

Solutions to this problem vary widely, but to a degree the most simple answer is good one: we need to send less people to jail. I am not a member of the "end all drug laws" fringe by any means, but there is no question that the War On Drugs has contributed more than its fair share to our astronomical incarceration rate; 57% of the U.S. prison population in 1999 were drug offenders. In my view, there is little justification for sending people to jail for possession of a non-addictive substance like marijuana, the medicinal benefits of which have been scientifically proven. Laws that require prison terms for offenses like these need to be relaxed.

Despite the popularity of appearing tough on crime, there is evidence that all this jail time isn't working. Compared to Canada our incarceration rate is massive and our sentences are extremely long, and yet our crime rate isn't any better. It is obvious that there is something deeply amiss in American culture.

I would encourage you to consider what you think and believe about this issue. The social aspects of the over-representation of minorities in prison populations are staggering. The political implications of being a nation founded on freedom and liberty which takes them away from so many of its citizens are huge. The global characterization of being the world leader in prisoners is something we Americans must decide if we want.

References:
Online Education: Incarceration in the USA
The New York Times: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
Wikipedia: Incarceration in the United States
About.com: 1 Out Of 32 Americans Under Correctional Supervision
UNODC: Global Incarceration and Prison Trends [pdf]
Ira Glasser's bicentennial speech to the ACUL, 1999 [pdf]
50 Facts That Should Change the World, Jessica Williams

Quotes: Senators, Stupid People, and a Little Common Sense

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'" Theodore Roosevelt

"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it." John Stuart Mill

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." Thomas Paine, Common Sense

An Open Letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham

I've never been a big fan of Al Franken - former SNL writer, author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (among others), and the recently-confirmed junior Senator from Minnesota. Though I have a soft place in my heart for the state of Minnesota due to its insane politics (they once elected a pro wrestler to the governorship) and awesome natives such as Garrison Keillor, Amy Sawyer, and Juli Kalbaugh, my exposure to Franken through his Air-America radio show was enough to convince me he was nothing more than a foil for the Sean Hannity crowd - a brash pundit adding noise to the national political conversation rather than insight.

So I was surprised in October when I found myself applauding one of Sen. Franken's first pieces of legislation. It relates to the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a former employee of KBR, a defense contractor in Iraq which is now owned by Halliburton. While working in Iraq in 2005, Jones was drugged and brutally gang-raped by seven of her male co-workers. When she awoke the next morning and explained what had happened, she was inspected by a physician, told she would lose her job if she left Iraq, and then locked in a shipping container for approximately 24 hours without food, water, or medical treatment. After procuring a cell phone from one of the guards she was able to call her father, who with the help of a Congressman was able to send agents to rescue her. Since the incident, one of the rapists has confessed to Jones, but she is obviously unable to identify the other six. The rape kit used by the physician who inspected Jones disappeared for two years, and then was found with crucial photographs and notes missing, hurting Jones' chances for pursuing a case through criminal courts.

Google's Big Play: Replacing Your Computer With the Internet

I've written here before about Google Chrome OS, Google's big gamble on replacing the traditional operating system with a web-browser and letting users store all their data in the cloud. But with all that geek-speak I've been throwing out there -- "cloud," "operating system," "web-browser," "market-share," "web 2.0," blah blah blah -- I'm sure the ideas haven't been coming across too well. So I was thankful when the confident Harrison B. pointed me to the following video today, which explains Google's OS in a way that's simple, straightforward, coherent, and (for me at least) exciting.



Do I think this is the future of computing? Well yes. Probably. The question to me is not will we one day let internet servers store all our data and crunch all our numbers instead of our home PC's, but when will this happen. Google thinks it's already happening. I'm not so optimistic. I still don't know anyone (well, that I know of) who has replaced Microsoft Office with Google Docs in their day-to-day lives. I know many businessmen who think it will be a cold day in hell before they put their sensitive, proprietary information on an internet server. I know quite a few gamers who aren't satisfied with just online flash games. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions as to how this will play out regarding peripherals. How do you install a printer on a web-browser based OS? Lastly, it looks like I was wrong about the netbook market, which Google is initially targeting with Chrome OS. It just doesn't seem to be going much of anywhere.

So we'll see when this all goes down. But I have a feeling when it does, I'll be first in line.

A Senseless Waste of Liberty: Pfizer Leaves New London

You'll have to pardon me on this one, I'm mad as hell.

You may remember that four years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is permissible for the government to seize private property from citizens and give it to private commercial developers for the purpose of "economic development." The decision involved the city of New London, Connecticut luring the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to build a complex there, which city officials believed would generate $1.2 million a year in tax revenue and create almost 4,000 jobs. The city government convinced Pfizer by offering them huge tax breaks and seizing privately-owned land in order to build an "urban village" near the complex. The land's owners, most notably Mr. and Mrs. Kelo, did not wish to sell their land to the government or leave their homes. They sued the city for trying to take their property and give it to private, not public, interests in an area that was not blighted or in serious economic trouble. The case made it to the Supreme Court, where the Kelos lost in a 5-4 decision. The City then attempted to charge the residents thousands of dollars in rent, since it maintained that it owned their land during the five years in which the legal proceedings were taking place. This didn't pan out however, and the City ended up compensating the residents and even physically moving the Kelo's house (pictured above) to a new location.

Fast-forward to last month, when poor economic conditions influenced Pfizer to pull out of New London, abandoning their $350 million complex and terminating some 1,500 jobs. Though most of the homes left behind by the disappointed plaintiffs in Kelo v. New London were destroyed, the "urban village" was never built. Thus this infamous decision resulted in the Supreme Court giving the government the right to seize citizen's land for private use, and the government using this power to force people from their homes and turn their land into a vacant lot, all while destroying jobs, generating $0 in revenue, and wasting their tax money.

It is stories like these, in a time when the GOP is running away from its better nature after an infatuation with a befuddled soccer mom and the centrists who it desperately needs are jumping ship, that I remember and esteem the principles of limited government which draw me to the vague shadow of what the party once was. What a senseless waste of our liberty.

There is hope in this story, though. The Kelo v. New London decision influenced no less than 42 states to pass laws (some of them quite powerful) which inhibit government in exercising eminent domain for "economic development." In the long run, this influence may have done more to limit the government's eminent domain powers than the Kelo decision did to expand them. I take comfort in that.

References:
New York Times: Pfizer to Leave City That Won Land-Use Case
Guesswork Theory: A Very Bad Decision
Wikipedia: Kelo v. City of New London
Wikipedia: Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- Eminent Domain

Image: wageslaves