Google’s Role in Social Distancing

I thought this was interesting! Google is taking anonymized, aggregate data from Google Maps for public health officials to understand responses to social distancing guidance related to COVID-19.

Here is the data I pulled for the state of Minnesota. It looks like in general, 38% less people are travelling to work, 35% less people are travelling to grocery stores and pharmacies, and 58% less people are travelling to restaurants, cafes, and shopping centers. Rice County seems to be doing slightly worse at sheltering-in-place compared to the average in Minnesota, except in the travelling to work and parks categories.

Source: COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility)

The more you know!

The more you know!

Does a USB drive get heavier as you store more files on it?
Believe it or not, they get lighter. USB drives use Flash memory, which means the the ones and zeros of your data are stored on transistors. When you save data, a binary zero is set by charging the float gate of the transistor, and a binary one is set by removing the charge. To charge it, we add electrons, and the mass of each electron is 0.00000000000000000000000000091 grams. This means that an empty USB drive (which mostly holds zeros) weighs more than a full USB drive (which has ones and zeros). Add data, reduce the weight. However, you would need to weigh more USB drives than exist on the planet together at once before the difference in weight became easily measurable.

Not All is Doom and Gloom with COVID

All joking aside for once, if there’s one thing I can say about all this Coronavirus “craziness”, “pandemic”, “panic”, “crisis”, “precaution”, “stupidity” (pick the adjective you most relate to), it is this: People are forced to think out of the box for solutions to problems they never thought they’d encounter, and this is NOT A BAD THING! It shakes up the status quo and forces people out of their comfort zone.

People will have to educate themselves on using technology to get work done, instead of forcing mostly unnecessary (and potentially hazardous right now) in-person meetings.
Businesses owners will have to remain agile and adapt their business models on the fly. Especially now, as bars and restaurants are being forced to close. They have to. Otherwise they have no choice to close and layoff all their workers.

Yes, the stock markets are down. If you are on a long-term plan to retirement, it’s going to recover no problem. This is an opportunity, not a crisis. Make the best of the hand you’re dealt now!

Above all, don’t sweat the small stuff. So, you may need to use a fabric cloth instead of a paper towel. So you may have to meet a new neighbor to borrow a couple of eggs. The world survived many centuries without all the modern conveniences we take for granted now. Use it as a way to learn history, and use it as a way to learn something new.

Nearly nobody has framed this event as a positive one. Yet, with a slight change of mind, there can and will be good things that will come out of this that will help us, and will help the country grow stronger. Get ready for a wild ride guys! This is no doubt a story people will be able to tell their grandkids about. 😃

I’m a New Mac Owner!

I never thought the time would come, but I have to announce I’m a brand new Mac owner! Mind you, it’s not a new Mac, but I am a new owner! 😂

I received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition!

Wow! I received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from our District’s Representative Jim Hagedorn for the “Hidden Gem” award I received from the Faribault Virtues Project. It was an honor to be recognized for some work I’ve done over the years preserving history in Faribault and Rice County. If we all pitched in and helped our community in one or two small ways, what a wonderful place our world could become!

50 Years Ago Today, Man Embarked on a Mission to Set Foot Upon the Moon

At 8:32 a.m. on July 16th, 50 years ago, 3 American men, strapped into the seats of their Apollo command module, were propelled into space by the tallest and most powerful rocket ever created, the Saturn V. It would take them 3 days to reach their destination. The mission…to land and walk on the moon.

The computer to take them there operated at a 0.002048 GHz clock speed. It had 0.000002 gigabytes of magnetic-core RAM, and 0.000036 gigabytes of hand-woven core rope ROM. It weighed 70 pounds. Today’s computers have millions of times more memory. Yet, in 1969, it performed flawlessly to navigate the men into lunar orbit.

These videos are the best thing I’ve found to help set the scene in your mind on how big of an event this was, and still is, in all of mankind. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did!

Video Credits:
“Apollo 11 liftoff unseen spectators original launch footage”, Youtube, suicidecrew.
“Apollo 11 Launch HD”, Youtube, NasaHD.

DeepFakes are going to be a problem…

For almost a year, I have been assisting as a Subject Matter Expert for the Electronics Technician Association (International)’s Audio/Video Forensics Analyst examination. One of the reasons I’ve been assisting is because it will become increasingly important to have skilled professionals analyze what is “real” and what is “not real” in regards to created video.

As computers get more and more powerful, it becomes easier to generate complete 3D models of a person’s face, and it becomes easier to create a voice model of a person’s speech with only a few minutes of recorded audio. These two combined together can produce very convincing hoaxes, termed as a “deepfake”. Do you think the average Internet user that shares “everything” on Facebook could tell the difference?

Whether they are used for extortion, election manipulation, or blackmail, “deepfakes” could be the biggest threat to modern society in the years ahead. Now, more than ever, it’s very important to use logic instead of emotion, facts instead of opinions, and multiple sources instead of a single news channel, when forming your own opinion about anything.
Be sure to check out this TechRepublic article and video below on deepfakes, and the importance of skilled experts in the future to assist with the detection of these threats.

Computerized Car Navigation in 1986

It’s easy to take for granted modern car navigation systems. After all, the functionality is built into every modern Smartphone. However, back in 1986, before the GPS system even existed, a couple of yachtsman with an idea formed a company called Etak, which made it a goal to make a navigation system with street-level detail that could be installed in an automobile.

They succeeded. Instead of using satellites, they used “dead reckoning” which compares the car’s location to a fixed spot. A modern (at the time) IBM XT computer running at 4.77 MHz with 128 kilobytes of memory got stuffed in the vehicle’s trunk. An oscilloscope-style green CRT display with buttons was mounted up on the dash, a fluxgate compass was mounted on the back windshield to keep track of magnetic north, and a pair of hall-effect sensors were mounted to the non-driven wheels of the car to count off miles, and the difference in rotational speed between the wheels kept track of corners. Map data was loaded on cassette tapes which each held about 3 1/2 megabytes of information. Users switched tapes whenever they roamed into an area not covered by the current cassette.

The system was about $1,500 and could be installed by a company that did radio and speaker installation in cars. They sold about 5,000 of them. The Etak technology lived on to the modern Internet era, where its map data was used by companies such as MapQuest and TomTom. Etak also created the fixed-map viewpoint (you in the center, the map moves around you) which is still used in all modern navigation systems.

Here’s a video of this incredible system at work: https://youtu.be/CHCCjlSWbHE?t=863 You can also read more about this technology here: https://www.fastcompany.com/…/who-needs-gps-the…

Finding a Work/Life Balance

168 hours makes one week, and many of us struggle to find the time to fit all the things we have to do and what we’d like to do in those 168 hours.

This is a powerful article and gives some great insight on how to achieve a good work and life balance. One simple way to restructure your week can be accomplished by simply changing your words from “I don’t have time for that” to “That’s not a priority for me”. Everyone seems to accept “I don’t have time for that” because we can all relate to shortage of time. However, saying “that’s not a priority for me” allows you to feel the true impact of the decisions you make.

For example, “I didn’t play with my kids this weekend because I didn’t have time.” seems to make you feel better being the busy person you are, however, restating this to “I didn’t play with my kids this weekend because it’s not a priority for me” is particularly daunting and better states the impact of your decision.

Please, “make it a priority” to give this article a read if you believe you might have problems achieving a good work/life balance. Your relationships are worth it.https://paulcunningham.me/achieving-work-life-balance-in-168-hours?fbclid=IwAR3z5knfMGXAkjKnkv9pLR9Ze-jULOTHo8TEH0kiu7AhaOBlnuEgMYSBvNM

A Tornado Just Hit Faribault.

The National Weather Service did its job tonight extraordinarily well. The Rice County Emergency Management and Dispatch sounded the alert sirens quickly. Our Skywarn social media posts went out immediately. These sources gave everybody in Rice County at least 15 if not 20 minutes of warning before the tornadoes came through.

Things are a mess around here. Bethany and I are OK, and our part of town had more tree damage than anything. This is the only damage I had.. a single piece of front fascia hanging down. It is absolutely nothing compared to several families dealing with losing their homes or businesses tonight.

West of Faribault is like a scene out of “Twister”. Corrugated metal hung up high in trees. Roofs of sheds laying in unharvested fields. Halves of silos gone completely. Trees through people’s living rooms. Horse trailers laying on their roof in the ditch. Recreational Vehicles tipped over like Hot Wheels at LeMieux’s Resort.

North of Faribault, not many hangars are left without major damage at our Airport. MetCon has structural damage to their building. The freeway, closed down because of vehicles tipped over and debris littering the roadway.

I’ve never seen this kind of devastation around the Faribault area. This is going to be talked about for a long time.