"Mathematical Marbling" article in IEEE-CGA

My article has finally appeared in print:


Lu, S.; Jaffer, A.; Jin, X.; Zhao, H.; Mao, X.; ,
"Mathematical Marbling,"
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Nov.-Dec. 2012 (vol. 32 no. 6) pp 26-35
ISSN: 0272-1716
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MCG.2011.51

Increasingly Frequent Storm Damage

A recent letter to the editor of the "Bedford Minuteman".

The IPCC says*:

More frequent extreme weather events are predicted to accompany global warming, in part as a consequence of projected increases in convective activity.

The projected increase from 1993 to 2012 is roughly 14% in the Northeast US.

With an increased incidence of severe weather we should also expect to see an increase in tree damage such as fallen limbs and toppled trees. The increase in power outages in recent years is not inconsistent with severe weather having increased 14% in Bedford since 1993.

In addition to causing power outages, power lines being knocked down by tree limbs create a hazard requiring specialists from NStar to repair them. In areas with buried utility cables, downed limbs and trees can be cleared immediately by homeowners and emergency personnel.

In the face of this growing problem, it would make sense for the Town of Bedford to set as a long-term goal the elimination of utility-poles in favor of buried cables. The advantages to Bedford would be:

1. Reduction in outages of power, telephone, video, and data services due to severe weather;
2. Elimination of electrocution hazards due to downed power lines;
3. Faster clearing of damaged trees and downed limbs from roads and yards;
4. More robust street trees not weakened by pruned centers;
5. More attractive neighborhoods;
6. More authentic-looking Historic districts.

Aubrey Jaffer
Bedford Global Warming Action Coalition

* Section 8.3.9.3 "Extreme Weather Events" in
    "The Regional Impacts of Climate Change"
    by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
    http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/regional/index.php?idp=232

Excess Fructose Content of American Foods

Agave

In Sept. 2011, the USDA updated their National Nutrient Database to Standard Release 24, increasing the number of foods from 7636 to 7906, and the number having fructose and glucose measurements from 1134 to 1207.


I have updated http://voluntocracy.org/Fructose (Excess Fructose Content of Foods) with the new data.

Emacs bell in GNU/Linux

The bell in the Emacs text editor hasn't worked in the Fedora and Ubuntu distributions for years.  On February 2, Bug 562719 - Bell does not work in emacs in RedHat Bugzilla noted that this was not fixed in yet another release of Fedora.
But today, Peter Oliver posted a solution:

As a workaround, put the following in your .emacs:

(setq ring-bell-function 
      (lambda () (start-process "canberra-gtk-play" "*canberra-gtk-play*"
    "canberra-gtk-play" "--id" "bell")))

This solution also works for Ubuntu-10.10.

Ubuntu wired network unavailable after suspend/hibernate/resume

Although the wireless network recovers after suspend/resume, 10-base-T connections did not recover in Ubuntu-10.10 (GNU/Linux) on my HP dv7.  Gib2800 fixed a similar problem in  Thread: [ubuntu] Wireless network unavailable after suspend/hibernate/resume ACER3624W MADWIFI HARDY.  But that was for Ubuntu-8.10 and locations have changed.  This post updates his instructions.

In a shell, run lshw.  In its output find the string after "driver=" in the *-network sections (my computer had one for wired and one for wireless).  Then (as root) edit  /etc/pm/config.d/config so that those driver names appear on the right-hand side of SUSPEND_MODULES= in double-quotes, separated by spaces.  For example:

SUSPEND_MODULES="ath9k r8169"

That fixed my dv7.  I rebooted after making the change, so I don't know if rebooting is necessary.