Recently, I returned from fighting wildfires in Northern California. I have been in the Mt. Shasta area and Chester, CA for the past three weeks (Peterson Complex, Cub Fire, and Onion Fire). Temperatures were hot, often above 100 degrees and the relative humidity in some areas was in the low teens.

On my bus ride back up to Oregon as we were driving through Redding, the hills were releasing smoke on the west side of I-5. I found an article about this, Blaze rushes through hills west of Redding (http://www.redding.com/news/2008/jul/12/no-headline—a1fires12/)

As the burgeoning fire swept through the hills west of Redding, Highway 299 was shut down and mandatory evacuations were issued in the French Gulch area. An advisory evacuation order was announced for some residents in the historic town of Shasta.

From an article from the International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/13/america/12wildfire.php),

Hundreds of wildfires have blackened nearly 1,200 square miles, or 3,100 square kilometers, and destroyed about 100 homes across California since a rare lightning storm ignited most of them three weeks ago.

Officials say more fires have been burning at one time this year than during any other period in recorded California history.

“This is truly a national disaster. The magnitude is incredible,” said Daniel Berlant, a state fire agency spokesman.

Jason Kirchner, a spokesman for U.S. Forest Service, said firefighters had spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the blazes.

About 20,000 firefighters from 41 states and Puerto Rico were fighting more than 320 active fires around the state, and more were on the way from Mexico, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered 2,400 members of the National Guard to join the fire crews on the ground, the first time for the first time in more than 30 years.

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October 2007 California wildfires are a series of wildfires that began burning across Southern California on October 20. At least 1,500 homes were destroyed^[4] and over 500,000 acres (2,000 km²) of land burned from Santa Barbara County to the U.S.–Mexico border. As of October 24, 18 active fires were burning in the region.^[5] Seven people died as a direct result of the fire; 85 others were injured, including at least 61 fire fighters^[6].California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in seven California counties where fires were burning.^[7] President George W. Bush declared an emergency in the State of California and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts.^[8] Over 6,000 firemen worked to fight the blazes; they were aided by units of the United States Armed Forces^[9], United States National Guard.^[10], almost 3,000 prisoners convicted of non-violent crimes ^[11], and 60 firefighters from the Mexican cities of Tijuana and Tecate ^[12].

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From coolquiz.com, “History tells us that the @ symbol stemmed from the tired hands of the medieval monks. During the Middle Ages before the invention of printing presses, every letter of a word had to be painstakingly transcribed by hand for each copy of a published book. The monks that performed these long, tedious copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of individual strokes per word for common words. Although the word “at” is quite short to begin with, it was a common enough word in texts and documents that medieval monks thought it would be quicker and easier to shorten the word “at” even more. As a result, the monks looped the “t” around the “a” and created it into a circle-eliminating two strokes of the pen.

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Imagine being able to actually touch your digital photos and drag them around by hand, or use your finger as a Photoshop paint brush. You can do that and much more with Microsoft’s first surface computing product, imaginatively named Microsoft Surface ($10,000; Q4 2007).

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

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“TOKYO, Japan (AP) — In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all — a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video.

Sony Corp. released video of the new 2.5-inch display Friday. In it, a hand squeezes a display that is 0.3 millimeters, or 0.01 inch, thick. The display shows color images of a bicyclist stuntman and a picturesque lake.”

Komotv

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“PARIS (AFP) – French Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a pioneer of the liquid crystal display (LCD) that is now a standard technology in today’s consumer gadgetry, has died, his family said on Tuesday.

De Gennes, who was 74, won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for groundbreaking work in liquid crystals and polymers, for which some of the judges accorded him the accolade of “the Isaac Newton of our time.” He died on Friday.”

yahoo link

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“A fire started by a homeless man knocked out service between Boston and New York on the experimental Internet2 network Tuesday night. Authorities say the fire, which also disrupted service on the Red Line subway, started around 8:20 p.m. when a homeless man tossed a lit cigarette. The cigarette landed on a mattress, which ignited and led to a two-alarm fire.”

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The Internal Revenue Service has been trying for years to upgrade its antiquated mainframe computers, which process Americans’ tax returns by churning through millions of lines of assembly code written by hand in the early 1960s.

But after more than 20 years and over $5 billion, there’s still no end in sight. Not all computer systems can talk to each other, information isn’t available in real time, and tax returns filed on paper are often manually entered by typists.

link

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Kevin Garrad of the 3rd Infantry Division looks to have gotten a little assistance from an unexpected source while on a street patrol in Iraq recently, when the iPod in his pocket got in the path of a bullet fired at close range, slowing it down enough that it didn’t pierce his body armor. As if that wasn’t a rare enough occurrence, the iPod in question was an HP iPod — imagine the odds!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiki/445618364/in/pool-appleusers/

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From slashdot, ‘ Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired’s, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, “A number of obvious uses jump out to me… the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549.”‘

Original Article

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