Thank You To The Rescuers

With all the devastation going on around Houston and the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Harvey…

I thought it would be nice to just take a moment to reflect.

First, the pain and suffering of the people affected. 

I couldn’t believe last night when I saw this image of residents in a assisted nursing facility sitting up to the necks in flood waters.

Or this morning, when I saw a photo in the Wall Street Journal of a firefighter holding a mother with her baby daughter lying on her, rescuing them through the waters. 

With over 3,000 rescues performed for people stranded in attics, rooftops, in cars, and all over the city and surroundings, I also think it’s important to recognize all the firefighters and other emergency workers who put their lives on the line to help others. 

The Houston area is expected to get 50 inches of rain in under a week, which is what their usual annual rainfall is. 

So there is massive flooding and damage from Harvey as well as 250,000 people without power. 

My prayers go out to the people impacted and gratitude to the people who help them. 

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Huffington Post)

Reconstituting The Water Of Antarctica

So Antarctica is the 5th largest continent of 7 in the world. 

It is 5.4 million square miles, and it is larger than both Europe and Australia. 

But it has only a temporary population of 5,000 people, mainly researchers. 

About 70% of the world’s fresh water is held in the Antarctic ice sheet, which is 90% of all the world’s ice. 

And the ice there extends 7,000 feet thick.

If all the ice would melt, the global sea levels would rise 2,000 feet!

Despite 95% of models over the last 30 years predicting the ice sheet melting due to global warming, it actually continues to expand.

It’s a paradox for the science community, but one of the explanations is that as ice shelves break off, they actually forms a protective barrier for the new ice being formed along the main ice landmass. 

Even with global warming, the average temperature in Antarctica is still -35 degrees Fahrenheit, and most parts never get above freezing. 

So here’s an idea–rather than fear global warming, is there an opportunity to use it and advance it, if only we can channel the effects of it for the good of humanity. 

The Antarctic Treaty System prevents nuclear weapons explosion there, but wouldn’t that be a cool way to melt some ice and get some fresh drinking water for this thirsty planet or even to somehow move to MARS for colonization there?

Also, we could place solar mirrors in space to redirect sunlight to melt the ice–that’s either some probably some pretty big mirrors or the dispersion ray of a space laser(s). 

The key now is to get the water to where you want it to go and not to destroy by massive flood our worldwide seaboard cities–and that’s where a mass molecular transporter comes along. 

There is still much to discover and invent, but when it’s done, I think we will definitely be heading to Mars and beyond.

Really, we have to, there is no other long-term survival choice for humankind. 

And perhaps, G-d placed the survival pod for us right under our feet at literally, the southern most point of the world, Antarctica! 😉

(Source Photo: here via Wikipedia)

Noah’s Ark–Must See!

Okay folks, this is great.

I want to see movie’s like this for the all Bible’s stories.

Applying the technology and special effects makes this just awesome.

More, more, more…love it.

Leadership Cloud or Flood Coming?

I came across two very interesting and concerning studies on cloud computing–one from last year and the other from last month.

Here is a white paper by London-based Context Information Security (March 2011)

Context rented space from various cloud providers and tested their security.

Overall, it found that the cloud providers failed in 41% of the tests and that tests were prohibited in another 34% of the cases –leaving a pass rate of just 25%!

The major security issue was a failure to securely separate client nodes, resulting in the ability to “view data held on other service users’ disk and to extract data including usernames and passwords, client data, and database contents.”

The study found that “at least some of the unease felt about securing the Cloud is justified.”

Context recommends that clients moving to the cloud should:

1) Encrypt–“Use encryption on hard disks and network traffic between nodes.”

2) Firewall–“All networks that a node has access to…should be treated as hostile and should be protected by host-based firewalls.”

2) Harden–“Default nodes provisioned by the Cloud providers should not be trusted as being secure; clients should security harden these nodes themselves.”

I found another interesting post on “dirty disks” by Context (24 April 2012), which describes another cloud vulnerability that results in remnant client data being left behind, which then become vulnerable to others harvesting and exploiting this information.

In response to ongoing fears about the cloud, some are choosing to have separate air-gaped machines, even caged off, at their cloud providers facilities in order to physically separate their infrastructure and data–but if this is their way to currently secure the data, then is this really even cloud or maybe we should more accurately call it a faux cloud?

While Cloud Computing may hold tremendous cost-saving potential and efficiencies, we need to tread carefully, as the skies are not yet all clear from a security perspective with the cloud.

Clouds can lead the way–like for the Israelites traveling with G-d through the desert for 40 years or they can bring terrible destruction like when it rained for 40 days and nights in the Great Flood in the time of Noah.

The question for us is are we traveling on the cloud computing road to the promised land or is there a great destruction that awaits in a still immature and insecure cloud computing playing field?

(Source Photo: here with attribution to freefotouk)