Plantagenet Penguinista

Blundering around on NASA, I picked up on Sunspot 720 , which not only produced 5 huge solar flares, but delivered the last one in 30 minutes. From 8 light-minutes away. A bit of quick calculation reveals that the storm was thrown at over a quarter of the speed of light! Here’s a closeup of the sunspot itself: “[Coronal Mass Ejections] can account for most proton storms,” says [ RHESSI mission head Robert] Lin, but not the proton storm of January 20th [2005]. He theorises that it was channelled along the Sun’s magnetic field lines. But still... faster than 25% of c! An interesting article.

Somehow I can’t imagine this stomping through a park, kicking over jeeps and gobbling up scientists. Nicholas Bakalar describes 17-inch-long Castorocauda lutrasimilis (AKA “beaver-tailed otter-like”): A well-preserved fossil mammal discovered in northeastern China has pushed the history of aquatic mammals back a hundred million years [to 164 million years ago ...]. It is the oldest swimming mammal ever found and the oldest known animal preserved with fur [...]. Until now, the oldest mammal fossils found with fur [...] were about 125 million years old. Most mammal specimens this old consist of no more than a few broken, fossilized bones. But this specimen is an almost complete skeleton. Even tiny middle-ear bones are intact. The well-preserved teeth—incisors, canines, premolars, and molars—look to have been ideal for feeding on fish and aquatic invertebrates, somewhat like the teeth of modern seals. Most significantly, the animal’s fur and soft tissue are also fossilized. There are cl

National Geographic reports that “Soft-tissue dinosaur remains [...] may not be all that rare”, stating that “about half” of the fossil samples tested had some: To make sense of the surprising discovery, scientists are beginning to rethink a long-standing model of how the fossilization process works. [no scat, Sherlock!] [...] Traditional ideas of how fossils form do not allow for the preservation of soft, perishable organic tissues. “We propose now that soft-tissue components of bone might persist in a lot more different animals, in a lot more ages and environments, than we once thought,” Schweitzer said. “All we have to do is look.” Er, actually, no. We also have to explain how it happens. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m happy-joyed that things have progressed far enough for NatGeo to announce that the fossil emperor has no clothes. Now, perhaps, we can start doing some more useful science WRT fossils instead of cowering in fear of the fatal brand of scientific heresy! But still... ad

Presented in tribute to an earlier-overheard conversation , not to mention generations of “ [insert despised 4WD brand] Recovery Vehicle” bumper stickers.

ROTFL reference overheard today: “Click on the Firefox downloader. [pause] That’s the blue ‘e’, but it’s mislabelled by default on many systems.”

If you examine this NetGear download page , you’ll see this line near the bottom of the first changelog: “Fixed a problem where a LAN service could not be accessed via WAN IP.”. NetGear did that for lil’ ol’ me. What it means is that you can static-route the external address of the DG834G to an internal IP address, so if an internal machine aims traffic at the external address it arrives at the internal machine instead of the router. All I had to do was insist, once, that a competitor’s product had this functionality, et voila, there it was within a day or two. Thanks, netgear!

Maybe this is why ArachNet’s hold music used to start “you’ll notice that your call wasn’t answered by a machine” and their buyer AmNet’s (not to mention all other large ISPs) calls are answered by a machine.

Too little reality can be just as harsh. People tend to step off tall structures, walk in front of fast-moving objects and say things that make them pine for a rewind button on life. We’re here anyway, and no matter whose theology * you believe it’s a one-way trip. You have two basic choices: enjoy it or hate it. I fail to see the point in spending a lifetime in despair or rage when I could be spending it discovering and enjoying stuff. That philosophy doesn’t expect or require every moment of even the most wonderful life to be a paean of exquisite joy, but it does make the “ground state” a lot more bearable. (-: I find that an important question to ask is “what is this for ?” You won’t always get answers — let alone meaningful ones — but it can interrupt an emotional crash-and-burn by engaging the reasoning part of your brain, it can bring useful caution in moments of euphoria, and it does lead to you discovering stuff. Occasionally, it will be very interesting stuff. * yes, of cour

The ibFirebird people are speculating about MySQL’s acquisition of Netfrastructure: This company offers a product which is a reimplementation of the Firebird database architecture, combined with a web-based application server front end. It was designed by Jim Starkey in the late nineties and combines a database, a custom java virtual machine and a web server. Jim Starkey is also the principal author of Datatrieve, Rdb/ELN and InterBase, which became Firebird after being open-sourced in 2000. Since the aquisition of InnoDB, by Oracle, MySQL has been in a difficult position: InnoDB was the centre piece of its 5.0 release. It has been discussed extensively in the Firebird community that MySQL should make a strategic move and use Firebird as its enterprise level relational/transactional engine. MySQL chose this path — in a round-about sort of way — by making the aquisition of Netfrastructure and hiring Jim Starky, owner of Netfrastructure. Jim had recently been contributing to the Firebir

Explorers have entered a huge cave in Venezuela called Cueva del Fantasma (Cave of the Ghost). How huge? This picture shows two helicopters sitting at the base of a waterfall inside the cave, looking for all the world like dragonflies. As an initial bonus, the explorers have discovered a new species of poison-dart frog there.

“ Linux worm turns on Mambo and PHP ” opines Iain Thomson. Oh, woe, disaster, shades of CodeRed! Not. While it’s nice for admins to have something to do and all, and it reminds us slackers (Linux admins) that nothing is completely bulletproof, I have to express significant disappointment at the shallowness of the challenge. Why? Mare.D relies upon a brace of exploits which are six and twelve months old, respectively. Any reasonably modern Linux distribution will competently self-update if told to do so. Even on a lazy once-a-week update cycle, this worm is eleven and three quarters months too late. It relies upon Mambo . Who runs Mambo? None of my machines, none of any of my clients’ machines. This sucker’s playing to a very small audience. Mambo has a new security announcement; maybe next year we’ll see another worm for it? (-: Even if Mambo were broken into, the exploit would download into a partition mounted “noexec” on all of my servers. GAME OVER EXPLOITER <1> and better lu

Jack Loftus made this interesting statement : “Microsoft, it seems, is paying attention. It released a scaled-down open source database, SQL Server Express.” Excellent, Jack, excellent! Top investigative reporting! Can you toss me a link to the source, please?

OK, Pascal , I'll see you and raise you a couple of kilowatts (-: If you like it, help yourself under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike licence . XCFs available on request. It’s basically just ten minutes spent with The GIMP’s GlowingHot plugin plus a brief frenzy of layer-copying. If you view just the image in a tab with a recent Firefox, I note, the tab’s icon is animated. I’m not sure whether to be overwhelmed or chagrined at that. (-:

I won’t give them any free linkage, but the Western Australian site linked from the slogan above via Google Ads has a photo on the front of it featuring a sports car (the plates say “DYNAMAT”) supposedly (the angle’s wrong) on an outback highway... and the dotted line on the highway is a wide-spaced yellow. I’m reasonably convinced that we’re not even looking at Australia here, but at least Western Australia’s centrelines are universally white, never anything else. If any Eastern Staters know of Australian road-markings which include a wide-spaced yellow centreline, do tell.

Bizarre Local Weather Event of the Month: out of a half-clear sky * on a hot, hot day, we suddenly got a cold and pelting downpour for a few minutes. The bottom of our street didn’t (yet). This has axed the thermometer, at least temporarily. The readout on our kitchen clock is still dropping and I wasn’t there to see it start, but I’d guess near ten degrees in less than five minutes. I’m also hearing thunder to the East. * the Western half is crystal clear, the Eastern half is full of medium-sized puffy clouds

Universe Today reports on a solar system which (potentially) wants to have it both ways. The system sports two dust discs, one spinning in each direction. Could be an interesting place to live. Eventually.

Or possibly Tangent sounds off at Microsoft, in court. Tangent said its business continued to be damaged by Microsoft’s non compliance with the final antitrust ruling. After running through the history of the PC, Tangent alleges that Microsoft has still failed to comply with a number of instructions and continues to violate [...] the Sherman Act [...] Because of “exclusionary practices”, Microsoft has been able to “increase, maintain, or stabilise prices at anticompetive levels” without the constraint of competitors. The antitrust complaint is a long one, and quite detailed and specific. I gather that because the complaint is for damages as a result of failing to comply with anti-trust regulation rather than an anti-strust complaint per se, this is not something which can easily be bogged or diluted by an unwilling US-DoJ.

Small Sir got a rude shock yesterday. When he started whining about something, instead of complaining about the whining, his Daddy required him to whine. Loudly. In the proper tone. Or else! He almost couldn’t do it. Even in the face of Dire Consequences. It was an epiphany. It’s been remarkably effective. It abruptly canned the whining of a tired 6-year-old boy for a whole afternoon, and similarly ushered in the quiet revolution this morning. In the bad old days when people were still dopey enough to do such things, one known cure for a child sucked in (pun intended) to smoking by its peers was to require it to smoke the whole pack (or chunder profusely or pass out in the attempt). The technique has also been applied to lollies, for those with an excessively sweet tooth. Now I wonder if we can find and exploit a similar approach to rolling out new software? Some way of isolating and concentrating the unpleasant “features&rdquo of the legacy system so that recalcitrant users can b

On Sunday 19 February 2006 05:36, Webroot Software wrote: Tip #2: Just Say NO! to Freeware Um. That statement is a bit, hah, sweeping. Microsoft’s Defender is freeware. ZoneAlarm is freeware. AGV Antivirus is freeware. Trend HouseCall is freeware. You probably need to qualify the term “ freeware ” a bit better, or choose a more accurate one which includes some shareware . You went on to explain: Remember that old saying: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Well, it’s definitely true when it comes to freeware, which often includes spyware in its program files. There’s another problem here: while TANSTAAFL does indeed universally apply, it is often possible to rearrange an existing situation to eliminate waste and duplication of effort. The resulting improvement can look like a free lunch without actually being one. I call to witness Firefox , Thunderbird , OpenOffice , PuTTY , WinSCP , The GIMP , 7-Zip and the cornucopia of other capital-F-Free and capital-O-Open software

...to be able to keep blowing them off like this . Apprently, they tried to trademark “UNIX®”, “UNIXWARE®”, “UNIX SYSTEM LABORATORIES” and “UNIX SVR4.2” and bounced on all of them. Worse, they appear to have deliberately lied in the applications, which is important for two of them, because The Open Group owns them, SCOX only licenses them, and those licence terms include this one: The Licensee undertakes to not do or permit to be done any act [...] which might prejudice the right of X/Open Company to the trademarks Attempting to steal the trademark certainly qualifies as an “act [...] which might prejudice the right of [The Open Group] to the trademarks”. So at this point SCOX have: struck out on the four trademark applications; and breached their licence to use UNIX® or UNIXWARE®; and probably committed (more) fraud in the process. Nice one, guys. An excellent followup to being called a liar by at least two court opponents and one judge. Need any more bullets?

Wasn’t quite sure whether to post this under my normal blog or the LCA2006 one. It lends considerable punch to Linus’ warning about facing an “angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph”. Thanks to Bob from Friends of the Sheltie for posting a hedzup on PLUG’s off-topic list — even though it’s hardly off-stopic for any Linux list. (-:

I was recently reading a scary Beeb article on how T Rex has “razor-sharp senses” (dull senses would be just fine with me in a pursuing four-tonne toothsome monster), when a small fragment of the text leaped out at me: Dr [Jack * ] Horner and colleagues carried out microscopic analysis of the dinosaur's vertebrae. They found tissue remnants related to the animal’s nuchal ligament, which provides passive support for the head and neck. Hmm? “Tissue remnants”? After 60-odd million years? Impressions in the rock? Then my attention was caught by another Beeb article from a year ago linked from that page: “ T rex fossil has ‘soft tissues’  ” The first thing we learn from the article is that The Beeb only has one T Rex photo. But it does go on to say: Dinosaur experts have extracted samples of what appear to be soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. The US researchers tell Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels. In the hotly contes

Sick of hot, bulky, unreliable video projectors? How about one the size of a matchbox which consumes a third of a watt for a typical display situation (1.5W full blast), has no moving parts and is always in focus? Cool! Literally.

Hi again, James ! There are surface similarities between Asian Invasion and Muslim Invasion but not enough to draw parallels. Amongst other differences, the former is an importation problem, and the latter is kinda home-grown. I guess we have to agree to disagree on that one. The sole commonality which does worry me (and I suspect it'll worry you too) is the idea that one can silver-bullet problems of this nature by simply keeping the scary aliens out, or somehow outlawing them. She’s a not gonna work. Nasties determined to get in have more resources and motivation for gaming the system than the average immigrant, so the main effect of clamping down on immigration would be to increase the proportion of nasties arriving. Similarly, the main impact of doing something bizarre like legislating a ceiling on family numbers will be to drive them underground (and look at how well it worked for the Chinese). I have not the slightest problem with you self-identifying as an Atheist, but I str

35 years from science fiction story to manufacture: the “impact suit” . Flows freely while moving normally, temporarily freezes in an impact. Liquid armour. How long am I given before someone makes lethal “boxing gloves” out of this stuff?

Kevin , I’m not sure that you understood the main point: I’m not agreeing with her in general, but she does have two valid points. Even a stopped clock tells the right time, albeit only twice daily. I’m not sure how aware you are of the assorted “silent wars” which have gone on in Australia, such as the “ownership” of towns by one faction or the other (in Western Australia, the factions are historically Catholics or Masons, or to a lesser extent Closed Brethren), so that fronting up in “the wrong&rdquol; town meant that you couldn’t get a job or long-term accomodation there under any circumstances. Nowadays, Masons have an image more along the lines of a kind of Rotary Club with a seldom-mentioned and benign spiritual dimension, and the Catholics (a few subtle hiring practices and the like aside) generally seem to have forgotten their duty to take over the world for Il Papa, but “back in the day” it was taken seriously. As seriously as a heart attack. Now picture a whole country

...or close enough , anyway. Still making misleading statements about what they own, I notice, but this time a faint harmonic of caution seems to have crept into their tune: SCO owns the core UNIX operating system, originally developed by AT&T/Bell Labs and is the exclusive licensor to UNIX-based system software providers. If they were interested in truth, they would say that “The SCO Group owns distribution rights to the residual proprietary aspects of AT&T/Bell UNIX® , as overseen by Novell — the exclusive licensor — and SCO is their sole agent for the purpose.” Given that Intel have now openly called SCOX liars in court — and SCOX have not objected to that — you’d have to have had your head under a rock for a very long time to expect to see truth out of D’ohl & co. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal...

The Beeb reports that Saba Bank Atoll, a coral-crowned seamount in the Dutch Antilles, yielded a new species “every day” of a two-week dive, including two species of gobi with a sucker in place of pelvic fins. Saba is near unique in that it is not associated with exposed land, so does not suffer the damage typically associated with that.

OK, so this blog wasn’t random enough. Let’s delve into social philosophy today. (-: Thanks, Greg Black, for pointing out a Danna Vale’s statement about Australia eventually becoming Islamified through breeding . White Australia has already been Catholicised by this exact same process (the largely-Catholic convicts outbred their largely-Protestant keepers), and the Aboriginal population has become so dilute that many “Aboriginals” are whiter than I (and often very confused about who they are, or should be). However, I think Danna’s solution would fail even in the unlikely event that it gets to be implemented, because those 100,000 annual infanticides are children who are not wanted . They are more a symptom of the “give me convenience or give me death” attitude which is slowly destroying our society than they are a direct cause of it (although there is that as well). Ironically, giving us convenience here means giving us death too. The next question to ask is: does Australia becoming

I recently stumbled across a SpaceRef article from last year on Deep Impact smacking into Comet Tempel: so far the scientists report seeing only weak emission from water vapor and a host of other gases that were expected to erupt from the impact site. The most conspicuous feature of the blast was brightening due to sunlight scattered by the ejected dust. Dust? Things got drier ? It turns out that when Shoemaker-Levy broke up prior to smacking into Jupiter, telescopes were trained to catch the increased emission of water due to the freshly exposed ice surfaces... and there was none. Again, when Comet Linear startled everyone by blowing up and disintegrating , there was “gas and dust” in the observations — no water vapour — except (in the case above) in the explanatory sidebar. Dry comets. What will they think of next? Scrolling back through the blog, I’m wondering if there’s an award somewhere for “least homogenous set of interest threads” in blog posts?

In tidying up some stuff I stumbled across an old Hale and Pace song. In trying to explain it to someone, I went looking for the lyrics. The only place in the world that has them is... tah-daah... a post of my own to the PLUG list six years ago! Since the direct archive appears to not be directly accessible via some web browsers, here’s a searchable copy-and-paste for posteri or ty: Last time I tried to talk to you / I couldn’t get past the electrified fence. / Just ’cos you took out a restraining order / doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends... I should’ve realised that something was wrong / when you made me wear those tight leather pants / and when, you said why can’t you be more like / Michael Flatley “Lord of the Dance”? You said, what’ve you ever given me? / and this is what I said... / I’ve given you everything / I gave you Greg van Hugh’s original hair / I brought you the sawn-off head / of a Wilderness Society bear I gave you the Paxtons’ couch / the one they sat on on A Cu

So I was worried about a slightly lopsided star? Well, it turns out that I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet... This object is called “Herbig Haro 111” (for George Herbig and Guillermo Haro) and the jet pictured is 12 lightyears long , or in other words Proxima Centauri would be only a third of the way up the picture if the emitting star was good ol’ Sol. Even more interesting was finding movies of the jet , which unfortunately end in 1998... I wonder if there have been any done for the 8 years since? It’s also interesting seeing the knots in the jet “rez in” as the imaging technology responsible for each frame improves. Stop-motion photography at a year per frame! Still... that there gas is scooting along in a fairly brisk fashion. About 500km/s, they say. And how does gravity account for a “Jetstar” with a 12ly tail? Shrug. It doesn’t.

This Astronomy Picture of the Day photo of Plato and surrounds on Luna has three interesting features on it which are not even mentioned (bar one, and that barely) in the accompanying text; use this thumbnail as a key, and open the APOD image in a new window : The blue line traces a gully, kinda-sorta, which has its wide end near Plato — that is, uphill — and the skinny end on a lunar mare (plain) — downhill — but perhaps even more interesting is that it is discontinuous . The riddle: How was it made? There is a similar feature near Aristarchus , called Schroter’s Valley (Valles Schroter) or Schroter’s Rille , and a different-but-intriguing linear rille (that photo was taken by an Apollo astronaut wielding a film camera). The pink splitpin outlines the amazingly straight lunar Alpine Valley, which (as you can see in this image ) also has a wandering, sputtery more-or-less central channel-ish. Why straight? Why does it have a flat “pool” at one end? How did the central channel form? T

I presume that the crew below will have changed bikes before attempting the section of course that the bloke(?) above is doing? Apparently, this was snapped during Tour de Gap 2005 . “The guy was, like... well, he was fairly flying ...”

Yes, that David Brin, famous SciFi author, this was sent from dbrin at baensuniverse com: Hello friends. David Brin here. You know I seldom use the long list of readers and fans who signed my guestbook at http://www.davidbrin.com/ Just a few notes, maybe twice a year. (My last e-mailing was in November [2005], sent from david_brin_author at sbcglobal net. I hope you got it!) Well, I’ve decided to make one special use of this list, in order to pass on a special announcement about a new online magazine for science and science fiction. Yes, it’s been tried online before, and I’ve never been impressed. Those other “e-zines” just never offered enough high quality content (stories and fascinating articles, art, and fun) to seem worth a subscription. But this time things are very different. Imagine what such a magazine would have to be like, in order to make you hunger for it, month after month. I think you just envisioned Universe, brought to you by the legendary science fiction impresario

...by the boxful, cut up and “ hedgehogged ” (no, New Zealanders, that does not mean mercilessly mown down on country roads). Hard to believe that something this tasty can be good for you. One of the good points of living here is proximity to the Wanneroo Markets (actually in Wangara , but you get that).

Consider the Butterfly Nebula: I would have thought “Double Jellyfish Nebula” more appropriate, but apparent Jellyfish Nebula was already taken and confusion would ensue. Now consider the Ant Nebula: Now consider the Black Widow Nebula: Now consider NGC 3079: Do y’all see any similarity in structure? Yet this is a galaxy, not a stellar nebula. If the effects are related, they evidently debugged any scalability issues. Now here’s a different question about the Rotten Egg nebula: How did this one get to be so lopsided? All of the other nebulae that have any structure at all seem to be more or less evenly balanced, like Eta Carinae . There doesn’t seem to be another star involved, so why such dramatic asymmetry? Finally, there's this one (more pictures and links here ): Given the “splatter disc” or ring around the waist of several other nebulae, I suppose something like this was more or less inevitable, but why does the ejecta bunch up like that? Also, this is at the heart of a super

“Got mole ?” Will you be prepared this September?

...some scientists have been finding many new species for the first time in a while. Including a ’roo.

Now here’s an interesting piece of journalism: Although G. wucaii’s skeletal features are very similar to later tyrannosaurs, it had three fingers, instead of the two found on most advanced tyrannosaurs. Also, it was likely as feathered as a chicken. Feathered as a chicken? Interesting... the LiveScience article it’s based on says: Paleontologists have unearthed two fossilized dinosaurs believed to be the oldest ancestors of the tyrannosaur family, researchers announced today. The new species had cranial crests and were likely covered in feathers, but were only a third the size of their famous cousin, Tyrannosaurus rex. Still, the discovery sets back the clock on the tyrannosaur family by at least 30 million years. The articles are accompanied by this picture, which shows some kinda-sorta fluffy proto-feather things: Now... back to the source Nature article , which... doesn’t mention features at all? What happened? Where did the feathers come from? It turns out that between Xu’s rep

Q: What do you call a fish with no eyes? A: A fsh.

Tux, speaking around the MSN moth, has the last word. This image comes out really horribly artefacted in JPEG. If anyone knows how to fix that, please tell!

Here is an interesting thing that I wish I could read: it’s a report by Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, covering the planning for rolling out thirty thousand SkoleLinux thin clients across 234 schools (100,000 users). Thanks to Knut Yrvin for the link. Now if only Australia’s Education Department could be so progressive.

This looks like a useful article to direct your Fearless Leader (CTO, CIO, director, whoever) to: it’s not uncommon for IT research firms to write reports that are funded directly by tech vendors. Money changes hands, and the vendor that commissions a report often reviews it before general distribution. [...] Analysts also show up in the marketing programs of the companies they cover. IDC’s Bob O'Donnell recently made an appearance in a video produced by thin-client vendor Wyse Technology on the advantages of thin-client computing. IDC also published a report, sponsored by Wyse, that found the software and hardware costs of thin clients to be 40% lower than PCs. Wyse, it turns out, is an IDC client. And there are hard-to-prove grumblings among small vendors that they have a better chance of being covered by a research firm if they are paying clients. It’s called pay-for-play, [...] Gartner’s financial statements also reveal a company with ties to the IT industry. The firm invests

... your head ? Worth a laugh, anyway. Good WTF value. “This is your brain on CDMA”.

...ending a long fine spell, at least in the northern suburbs. Big, dark clouds built up to the northeast and then it came splatting down at about 15:30 and has been (on and off) since. Niece Danielle married the incomparable Scott yesterday at Mulberry Farm, and we definitely could have used some cloud cover at that point. It’s a very pretty riverside function centre but the entire ceremony was held out in the blazing sun. Both participants got top value out of the union, IMESHO. Then there were cold drinks and excellent scones. It seems that Pia is going to visit this largely-forgotten patch of Australia near where the sun goes to sleep at night. Top stuff! Note to all sandgropers: Pia is good value, take full advantage of this opportunity. It also seems that BlogSpot’s photo upload thingy is kinda broken. First time I’ve tried to use it. The image from doesn’t show up on either the LA Planet or the blog post itself , yet it did at the time and does if you visit it directly. Do th

Our esteemed Secretary blogs about the experiments and achievements in Linux Conference Austral ia asia 2006 . Much to agree with. I did indeed have fun getting a passport, and reading between the lines, DIMIA (or whatever most of it was called at the time) has a sampling of decade or so worth of immigrants in the same boat. I came in on Dad’s British passport (“for the Colony of Australia”) annotated as “a Subject of the Commonwealth” so in principle I could get a British passport as well. As to the cost, the total cost of airfares and taxes for my trip worked out at AUD$1089+NZD$127 thanks to a super duper yew-beuwdy special from Qantas arriving at the right time. That’s still pretty horrific compared with ≅AUD$550 to fly to Sydney and back (full price economy), but not so steep when you factor in conf, accomodation and other costs. The difference probably worked out at about 30% overall. AUD$780 for SYD- BME at full price economy falls about halfway between the two. Of course for

New Scientist editorialises : Physics’ greatest endeavour has ground to a halt. We are in “a period of utter confusion”, said Nobel laureate David Gross, summing up last week’s prestigious Solvay conference on the quantum structure of space and time. That is worrying because the topic is central to finding a ”theory of everything” [ToE] that will describe every force and particle in nature. Einstein’s relativity, which reigned supreme for a century, is a flawed basis for such a theory. Although it deals with gravity, it tells us nothing else about the nature and interactions of matter. Crucially, general relativity is incompatible with quantum theory. Since the 1960s, theorists have struggled to solve this problem, so far to no avail. And the trouble is we have nothing to put in relativity’s place. The great hope, string theory, which views particles as emanating from minuscule strings, has generated myriad mathematical descriptions linked to the dance of particles. But these equati

...the RIAA shoots itself in the head . Ya gotta laugh, else you’ll never stop crying.

Nothing between Wanneroo and Northbridge even counts as a foothill compared with the lumpy bits at Dunedin. I notice that the council has been doing some half-hearted temporary repairs on the cycleway between Erindale Road and Cedric Street; the high points have been filed off fairly roughly — it looks like someone attacked the pavement with a stump grinder — and a few small areas of concrete (presumably the bits that didn’t take so kindly to the stump grinder) have been replaced with asphalt. It’s marginally less lethal, and the sign still promises permanent repair “next summer”. The mechanical vampire got a full quota of plasma and platelets in 14 minutes 55 seconds instead of the budgeted 39 minutes today. I wonder if they have races? I can’t believe how knackered I am, and it’s not even 9PM yet. Adios!

I’m cycling down to work today, to make up for my physical slackness over the last few days, and wondering how much that’s going to hurt. I don’t appear to have come down with the virus that hit Dunedin in the last few days of the conference , but the 5-hour zone shift has made for a couple of weird days (like, suddenly falling asleep just before lunch — I guess waking up with a laptop on your face is much nicer than the consequences of falling asleep at the wheel). Pia’s announcement of the LinuxWorld Australia conference & expo — also in Sydney, but on the 28th-30th of March — represents an interesting opportunity, but naturally (in case you hadn’t noticed, this is an imperfect world) has a poison pill in it named Bill Hilf from Microsoft, there to finesse in an “alternative view” which history says will be amusing but will also subtly introduce much plausible FUD. How you prepare your boss to weather this mental assault will vary from case to case, but since the keynotes (in

Went funny, resets didn’t help, the lights say it’s OK, but some (re)assembly may be required (reflashing, whatever). I’ve had enough of fiddling with it and replaced at and the old ADSL modem with a new all-in-one. It’s a model MNWAPGR , and could in principle run Linux (OpenWRT runs on other routers with identical chipsets) but nobody seems to have done so, perhaps because resources are very limited (2MB Flash, 8MB RAM).

It crashes for thee!” (With apologies to John Donne , of course). Both of the banks I use have an MS-IIS -based web presence. Neither of them are really interested in supporting standards (both sides miserably fail the W3C Validator ) or apparently anything besides MSIE and, grudgingly, Netscape Navigator — although both of them are rolling out Firefox internally. Since before about 06:00 WST, one of them has been returning “Document contains no data’ errors instead of web pages. This is one of the very large Australia-centric banks, whom you’d think had personnel constantly on hand, straining at the leash to ensure that their web services stayed up 24x7. Any bets that a leaky web app has soaked up all of the server’s RAM “because” it missed a scheduled reboot? At least two and a half hours so far, I wonder how many nines that’s eaten...