News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

This year in central Arizona we’ve experienced the wettest May on record and the first recorded rainfall in Phoenix ever on the date of June 5. This is all probably due at least in part to the El Niño effect.

During an El Niño the surface water in the Pacific ocean off the coast of Peru and Ecuador becomes warmer than usual (currently about 4 degrees F above normal). This has effects on the weather all over the world.

The El Niño effect can be seen as an oscillation of warmth back and forth across the Pacific. Years when the water off Peru is colder than normal have been dubbed La Niña years, and the effects on weather are basically the opposite.

The largest effect is on South America, where the warmer water evaporates more and causes a lot more rainfall, but weather over much of the world is also affected.

Computer models predict that this year’s El Niño could be the strongest in many years, and could have a big effect on weather if it continues to build into the fall and winter as predicted. Among the predictions:
– It could take a big bite out of the drought in California and Arizona — a strong El Niño is associated with up to a 174% increase in precipitation in California;
– Fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic than usual;
– Fewer tornadoes than usual in the mid-west;
– A milder than normal winter for much of the US.
– On the flip side, they predict an “extremely active Pacific typhoon season”. There are some cool graphs and maps at the link at the top of this paragraph.

Most of this sounds good for us! The biggest worry is that the increased rainfall in California and the southwest could cause flooding damage and injuries. And then there’s this:

El Niño has an interesting effect on overall global temperatures. See the graphs below.

The top graph shows global temperatures. The bottom graph shows sea temperature deviations in the eastern Pacific; red is warmer than average and blue is cooler than average.

Note how global temperatures tend to rise during an El Niño, and dip during La Niña. Note the spikes in the lower graph, particularly in 1973, 1983 and 1998. In each case the global temperatures hit a new high, and then plunged for several years afterwards. The strongest El Niño event in recent history occurred in 1998, and is associated with the highest average global temperatures ever recorded. The El Niños since then have been milder, and the La Niñas unabated, causing some observers to speculate that the rise in global temperatures has stopped. But in the long view, 1998 is clearly an outlier event caused by that year’s El Niño, with the general trend unaffected. If this year’s El Niño turns out to be as strong as predicted, we should set new records.

Nomorobo means “No more robo-calls”.

Last year the FTC issued a challenge to develop a system that would help reduce the huge amounts of telemarketing phone calls. One of the two winners of the challenge was “Nomorobo“.

I hate telemarketers! My Ooma phone system has private and community blacklists, and it helps a lot, but we still get 1-2 telemarketers getting through every day.

I just set up the free Nomorobo system, so I can’t really say yet how well it works, but reviews by other users are very positive. Unfortunately it won’t work with many of the current phone companies. It pretty much requires a VOIP (Internet) phone. So no Verizon, Century Link, AT&T. It is compatible with my Ooma VOIP phone.

Nomorobo requires that your phone system support “simultaneaous ring”, so that when you get a call it also connects to the Nomorobo office. They quickly analyze the call and if it is a telemarketer it is immediately blocked. If it is valid it rings through to my house.

I’ll see how it goes and report back here later.

Note: On my cell phone I use the Android app “Call Control” which seems to work very well. I get almost no telemarketer calls on my cell phone.

Eight years ago I published some data I had taken on the life of light bulbs. I recorded the lifetimes of bulbs in my kitchen ceiling. Everyone was so excited and thought it was the most interesting blog I had ever posted — NOT!

Anyway, despite the lack of enthusiasm, here’s a brief update.

Back in 2006 I had concluded that fluorescent (CFL) bulbs really did last a lot longer than incandescent bulbs. I have to now include LED bulbs in that statement too; promising, but too little data to draw any conclusions except that they are definitely better than incandescents and look better than fluorescents.

Back in the olden days, I had to replace each incandescent bulb about once a year, so with 7 bulbs there were on average 7 replacements per year. Now, it has been 2 1/2 years since I replaced any bulbs vs. an expected 17 (~2.5 x 7), so I have saved the cost of about 17 light bulbs (plus savings on the cost of electricity, of course).

In each of 2010, 2011, and 2012 I had to replace a single fluorescent bulb. I have never had to replace any LED bulbs, though I only have 3 in that ceiling.

So there you have it. Based on my data, CFLs really do last longer than incandescents, and LEDs are very promising.

Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and the day when the sun reaches its apparent farthest north position (of course actually related to the tilt of the earth’s axis and its revolution around the sun).

If you were at the north pole today, you would see the sun move 360 degrees around you at an even distance from the horizon.

Interestingly, the earth’s orbit isn’t exactly a circle, but slightly elliptical. And it happens that the earth is slightly farther from the sun right around our summer solstice, and slightly closer right around our winter solstice. In the southern hemisphere, of course, the situation is reversed and the sun is slightly closer during the summer solstice and farther during the winter solstice. It is believed that this effect has a slight mellowing of the seasons in the north, and a slight enhancement in the south. Thus the Antarctic winter is a little colder than the Arctic winter. There is still some debate on the size of this effect, and other factors, such as the Arctic ocean vs. dry land in the Antarctic probably have some effect too.

And it’s true that with patience and care you can balance an egg on its end today. However, with the same patience and care you can balance an egg on its end any day of the year. There is nothing special about today in that respect.

I was working at Intel back in the early 80s when Intel invented the flash drive (back then it was an EEPROM; almost the same). Of course then it was small capacity, slow and expensive, but the potential seemed huge. I remember remarking to a fellow engineer that we should shortly be able to replace our hard drives with flash memory. Current capacities weren’t large enough and it was much too expensive in those days, but I didn’t think it would be long before hard drives were obsolete.

Fast forward 30 years. During this time flash memory has continued to get faster and cheaper, but hard drives have also kept moving ahead getting larger and cheaper, and a little faster.

Hard drives are still cheaper than “Solid State Drives” (or SSD, as flash-based hard drives are called), but we seem to have reached a tipping point where it might be worth the extra cost for the gain in performance. So today I replaced the hard drive in my main desktop computer with an SSD.

I am amazed at the improvement in performance. It is greater than any other upgrade I have ever done, including upgrading the CPU or adding RAM. Windows 7 used to take over 2 minutes to cold boot, with icons trickling in for a minute or two after that, but it now is totally up and ready in about 20 seconds. Programs launch almost immediately. Even web browsing is much, much faster; apparently I haven’t been limited by my internet connection but rather by hard drive speed. When I compile programs, the hard drive used to thrash around loading libraries and modules for up to a minute; now it is not quite instantaneous, but very, very fast. Programs close much faster (as they write their configuration files to disk) and system shut down is much faster. I will no longer dread doing a Windows Update with the required reboot, since I can be back up and running in less than a minute.

If you are thinking of replacing your computer because it is too slow, you might consider just replacing the hard drive with an SSD for less than the cost of a new computer. It might give you more benefit for your money.

I got one from the Samsung 840 EVO series. They seem to have the best price and competitive performance.