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Below are images provided by Google Maps and the BNSF Website.
Satellite image of the proposed construction site of the SCIG Facility.
Screen Cap of map provided by BNSF, the company proposing the new SCIG Project
The Press Telegram reported on Kelp populations flourishing off the coast of Southern California. The main reason for the recent come back in kelp life has been a non-profit organization which acts as sea otters in the region. Back in the 1980’s, “no otter zones” were introduced and many otters were forcibly removed from Southern California waters and relocated to Northern areas.
Well after the otters were gone, sea urchin populations exploded, having no natural predator. As the sea urchin numbers continued to rise, kelp forests (the urchins main food source) began to disappear and along with it, the over 200 species which rely on kelp forests at one point or another.
Image of a Sea Otter eating one of its natural prey, the Sea Urchin.
Photo Credited to the Vancouver Aquarium
Now volunteer divers, hunt the urchins by hand, one by one. We are now the sea otters of Southern California. Many non-profits are now advocating for marine protected areas(MPA’s), and spending countless hours ensuring that urchin populations do not explode. If you ask me though, it just seems a bit ridiculous, man kind spending countless man hours, and expending so much energy to do something nature would have done on its own. Whats the point of spending all this time hand picking urchins, when otters would do it for free.
Arial Image of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Kelp Forrests reaching the surface of the water.
Phot Credited to: Geology Department at Cal State University of Long Beach
Well this year the no otter zone laws were removed and maybe finally otters will be reintroduced into one of their natural habitats. So if you live in Southern California, and you are ever close to any of the MPA’s near San Pedro and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, keep an eye out. You may see something more than just a dolphin or two!
You may or may not have heard of two unrelated, but possibly not so unrelated stories that came up in the news a few days ago. One being the death of Shane Todd, an American Engineer working in Singapore for the Institute of Macroeconomics (IME), a well-regarded division of the government’s Agency for Science, and Huawei Technologies, a chinese Telecom giant. The second being that U.S firms are now accusing the Chinese army for recent cyber attacks on U.S business’, Government and Critical Infrastructure.
The first story at first doesn’t seem to fishy. Singapore police reported Todd’s death as a suicide, claiming that he drilled holes in his shower, bolted in a pulley, and tied a strap to the toilet and then hung himself. Suicides happen all the time right? Well it seems strange that a person would commit suicide when their co-workers say that person seemed particularly upbeat that day, he had all his clothes washed, folded and ready to come back home to America, and even had price tags for his furniture he was trying to sell.
The front door was unlocked and there was no sign of an investigation – no crime-scene tape, no smudges from fingerprint searches. “The first thing I did was make a beeline for the bathroom,” Mrs Todd recalled. She wanted to see exactly how Shane had died – and she saw nothing that fitted the police description. The marble bathroom walls had no holes in them. Nor were there any bolts or screws. The toilet was not where the police had said. (TR Emeritus)
But what exactly was Todd working on while in Singapore? Well a hard drive (which was beleived to be a speaker) was recovered by the Todd family. The hard drive contained a back-up of his computer files, including his work at IME, and a timetable and plan for a project that apparently involved IME and Huawei. The plan called for the co-development of an amplifier device powered by Gallium Nitride (GaN) a substance similar to that of silicon, but which can handle higher temperatures and process more information than conductors made of silicon. Although this technology had great potential for consumer products the real scrutiny stems from its great potential in the military field, for uses such as improved radar and satellite communications.
Shane, it turns out, had deep misgivings about the project he was working on and feared he was compromising US national security. Huawei has been deemed a security risk by The House of Representatives intelligence committee after an 11-month investigation, that it suspected communications equipment made by Huawei could be used for spying.It recommended the US government not use components made by Huawei, or its rival ZTE, because neither could be “trusted to be free of foreign state influence”.
His family wants more answers, but IME refuses any involvement with Huawei, and claims a GaN project with Huawei never went past preliminary talks. It also claims that in its work to better its society it works with many partners, “Upholding and respecting the confidentiality in project interactions with partners is paramount to the institute (IME Statement)”, an exert statement from the IME website about the death of Shane Todd. Huawei have also declined interviews, and the investigation is still on going.
In other news though, a U.S Security firm has now accused the Chinese Military of sponsoring cyber attacks on U.S firms, Government Agencies, and Infrastructure. A vast amount of cyber attacks have been coming out of a relatively small neighborhood on the outskirts of Shanghai. Well coincidentally enough, The People’s Liberation Army has a base right in this very neighborhood. P.L.A Unit 61398’s headquarters are in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower. In that office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.
Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracked for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups. Known to many of the victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or the “Shanghai Group,” they are responsible for an alarming number of intrusions and recently the amount of attacks has been growing rapidly. A large number of which have been traced directly back to the doorsteps of the military headquarters. Although they could not place them directly inside the building, but it seems impossible that so many attacks could come out of such a small area.
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” (New York Times)
Whether or not the P.L.A are actually committing the hacking attempts, or are hiring contractors to do so, or flat out allowing rouge hacker groups to “have at it” at key American institutions,cyber war seems to be something that not only the United states needs to begin to be worried about in order to keep our nation secure.
Even though these two events are in reality most likely unrelated, and it is probably just me over reacting thinking the world is coming to an end, but it seems to me that the days of the cold war with Russia may be returning. Only this time we will be at cyber arms against China, one of the most rapidly growing nations in the world. It would be a lie to say that the U.S it self does not engage in these activities, in fact that is the way we know where all these hacking attempts come from. But it is another for a nation to sponsor attacks either directly or indirectly, on a nations Power, Military Bases, and Economic Centers. It may seem a bit paranoid, but maybe talking with China (One of the main fiscal supporters of North Korea, and deemed N.K’s “Best Friend”) to try and improve relations is no longer working. We are in a very delicate time in the worlds history, a time in which power balances can shift and new lines can be drawn. I guess in the future we need to be prepared for everything.
So how many of you have a digital phone, probably a lot of you. If you have a cell phone, well guess what, you have a digital phone. Well anyways, when you make a call what most people would say they hear on the other end is, of course, your voice. Well turns out that is partially true, but really what it is, is a computer emulation of your voice.
You see when you talk into the reciver of your phone, it goes through a series of conversions before it comes out the speaker of your friend, or mom, or bosses phone. First your voice is recorded and sampled at about 8000 samples per second, those samples are then transformed into an 8 digit binary code (a series of digital 1’s and 0’s), and then transferred over the medium (digital phone lines, cellular towers, etc.), and finally the binary code is reversed into an emulation of the sound of the persons voice into the speaker on the opposite end.
The same goes for microphones, and other electronic digital recording devices. Pretty neat huh? That just kind of blew my mind and wanted to share that with you all! Hope you found this as interesting as I did, and who knows maybe impress people with a little fun fact next time you are at dinner or something!
So class is back in session, and everyone is scrambling to buy text books, school supplies and to just flat out get classes. Now if you are a college student you know that the cost of education has been on the rise, and even if you are not a college student it is an issue that is hard to ignore.
But along side the rising cost of tuition, the cost of textbooks is on the rise as well. Now yes, one can find books on sites like Amazon.com and save a couple hundred dollars, but there is one thing that any college student can’t ignore. It’s the Professors who have mandatory books written or in part worked on by the professor them self.
Just this semester I thought I was getting away with finding the generic version of a textbook on Amazon fro just five dollars! I thought i was so smart saving my money and not buying the stupid LBCC edition which was one hundred forty dollars, but turns out in the end I didn’t save any money at all. The professor, which possibly for sake of full disclosure, mentioned to us that he helped develop the online program and was one of the founders. He later proceeded to tell us that if we bought a used book or generic version we still have to buy the mandatory online code, which costs one hundred dollars on it’s own. For me I still ended up saving a few bucks as I Only paid five dollars for the text, but there were a lot of people who were now stuck paying more than they would, had they bought the LBCC edition.
My question though, is when college professors, write, co-write, or develop software and books, do they get a cut of the sales. If they do, even the smallest amount, then i feel it is unfair for them to make the material they make money off, a required material.
Now I understand many teachers do not make a lot of money, and they have to do what they have to do to survive, but we are in a time when it is hard to go to school and even harder to pay for it, and if teachers are making profit off of their students then there is something wrong with our system.
I may be wrong, maybe they do not get royalties or any percentage of sales, but if you know the answer, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail at closetstudioblog@gmail.com
So it seems the future of power production in America might be mini-nuclear! Why do I say this might be the future? Well it seems the United States Energy Department has invested some $400 million in a company named Babcock & Wilcox mPower, the company which has built a prototype mini reactor.The core, the cooling system, and everything else, is self-contained in a rocket-shaped steel cylinder, which producers of the product say make it safer than traditional reactors. But the most surprising thing, the reactors will be small enough to build in a factory and ship on trucks, like prefabricated houses. A truck rolls up with all your parts and all it takes is a few tools and some man power and you have a self contained nuclear reactor.
The Exterior of the Babcock & Wilcox’s prototype nuclear reactor.
As you can see, the entire plant looks nothing like a traditional nuclear power plant. The first thing, it doesn’t take up a vast amount of land to contain these mini-reactors, so no giant power plant that can be seen for miles around. The second being, no giant cooling towers. The iconic twin concrete towers which look like smoke stacks are missing from this shot. Of course being smaller in size, these reactors output only one tenth of the amount of energy that traditional nuclear does, but if we could have more of these smaller plants located all around the landscape you would no longer have a need for coal, natural gas, or any other energy source.
Now it may not be the perfect energy as you have the issue of how to get rid of nuclear waste, and it is an issue. We can either recycle the waste, which gets into a long complicated process I won’t explain, which allows us to reuse spent fuel rods. Or we can bury it, in hopes that the containers we buried it in wont leak or be compromised and disturbed. On the other hand it is an extremely efficient energy source. There is not a fuel source on this planet which is as dense in energy as uranium and plutonium based nuclear energy. So until we can figure out real fusion and use it on a large scale, this seems to be the best alternative we have on our hands, if not for a long term solution.
An image captured from a work floor of a business which specializes in making the massive concrete storage containers that spent fuel rods are stored in.
This new power source could also be a great way to create jobs, not just for standard construction and development, but could also begin a trend of high tech, high wage, high level education jobs. The kind that America really needs to begin pushing for. So who knows if they keep making nuclear reactors smaller, safer and more efficient, maybe those nuclear powered cars they dreamed of in the 40’s are just around the corner.
Yester went to one of the volcanoes here in El Salvador! Here, San Salvador, the capital, is built right at the base of the volcano. Even though the last eruption was in 1919 it’s still crazy that people just live here. Thousands of them, and they don’t live in any fear!
Then again back home in California, we live right on fault lines! Can’t live in fear right?
Watching the Presidential Inauguration even here in El Salvador, it’s a world event!
The next four years with this man will truly shape the world. Even if you do not agree with his views its hard to deny he has made an impact in this nation and world wide!
The bus system is on strike apparently, so this is how people get around! No laws against cramming a bunch of people in the bed of your truck and driving them around haha!
Brother just did a speed test, closest server is in Guatemala! Haha with less than 1 mbps! I’m lucky I even have internet! Lmao
The 2'x2' Studio 