Plantagenet Penguinista

Just watching the penguins’ Caper from the Madagascar DVD. It’s a bit... very... different...

Today, I had some weeds to scrape out of some cement. Simple? The first issue is that I am not alllowed to use appropriate tools to do the job. Something like a shovel is too sharp, so I had to find a near-blunt scrapey thing which didn’t count as a sharp tool, and use that for sraping the weeds out of the cement. The second issue is that even with a convenient-length tool, putting the effort in to scrape maybe 30 or 40 small stems out of cement pathways is, well, exhausting. I’m very glad that Mardie donated us an exercise ball, because it means that I have (non-sharp) tools for disentangling my backbone afterwards. The real, inside damage of having headbutted stuff at tens of kilometers per hour is starting to show through. The third issue is picking up the scrapees . No way, end of story. Too much pain to make the job worthwhile. So — I tried a stiff broom... and after another exercise-ball session, I have some of the weeds tidied away. The fourth issue is making healthy people u

FEMALE HORMONES FOUND IN BEER Scientists for Health UK suggested that, considering the results of a recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer, men should take a concerned look at their beer consumption. The theory is that beer contains female hormones (as hops contain phytoeostrogens) and drinking it may turn men into women. To test the theory, 100 men were given 6 pints of beer each to drink within a one hour period. It was then observed that 100% of the men gained weight, talked excessively without making sense, became overly emotional, couldn’t drive a car, failed to think rationally, argued over nothing, refused to apologize when obviously wrong, and had to sit down while urinating. No further testing was considered necessary.

OK... weird movie of the year, so far: a Korean plasticene animation called Doggie Poo. To my great surprise, it wasn’t anywhere near as shocking as I expected, in fact had some fairly magic moments. However, the thing which made me giggle was a star’s name: the actor who voiced the Doggie Poo was named Katie. We have had several (femme) friends over the years affectionately known as “Katie-poo”...

SWMBO uses a certain online auction site a fair bit, but it does have a number of shortfalls, one of them being shoving every purchase through (expensive and owned by auctioneer) PP purchasing systems by default and now — potentially — Microsoft enslavement with all of the detriment thus implied... so now I’m looking for useful alernatives. What’s your favourite auction site, and why? Please Reply to this post now and tell me about it.

Apparently, we’re not allowed to mutate at all ; so conclude a geneticist, philosopher and a chicken farmer, because (and I quote): “Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.” OK, now I’m confused! If the non-chicken is forbidden to mutate — specifically, is not to mutate its genetic material — then how did (s)he arrange to spawn a chicken? Magic? Act of willpower (er... hey... — come on — this is a chicken we’re discussing here, not Howard the Duck)? A spare “Get Into Chickenhood Free” card? Umpire looks the other way? After all of the to- and fro-ing which has happened over the years, I’d like to see an answer with a real reason behind it.

#1-son Xan (6.5yo 2nd child) did a “plasticene painting” today. I haven’t yet asked him who or what the sharp-fanged black beastie is yet. #3 child ( Miss Dinosaur , 5yo — just) has also entertained herself by inviting our new boarder (Daniel) to her birthday (next year, we presume) — including getting him to explain how to write down his name on the invitation. It was... um... entertaining to watch this dignified 16.5yo coming to terms with his name as a series of non-descript lines well enough to relate their arrangement to Miss 5yo. He got through it all quite well; probably much better than I would have. (-:

... than our whole world . This “Sun” thingy down-gravity of us can be quite large and impressive. I’m quite thankful that we don’t actually get our summers directly this way.

Ennai kuowt from a report on the most recent updates to the WMAP universe-map: The strangest mystery that arose from the first-year data was the alignment of the broadest fluctuations about a single axis in space. This alignment persists in the combined three-year data. Whether it represents some new, previously unrecognized phenomenon (perhaps yielding a deep insight into the physics of the big bang) or is merely a statistical fluke remains a subject of active investigation and debate. [...from...] Careful analysis has shown that the strange alignment of the broadest Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations is real and significant at the 99% level. The alignment, together with the extreme weakness of those broad fluctuations, presents a real mystery whose resolution is not yet in sight. Note that the reporter(s) swiftly return to the less-worrisome traditional dunno, prolly not important elusion with the next line: “On the other hand, alignments with the ecliptic turned out to

Stars which go “pop!” — drop a nebula — may well be dying. Well, if our star (the Sun) went pop like this, we’d certainly be dying! I’m impressed to learn that this particular star blows wind up to about a million miles per hour (1.6 million km/hr, from the Sun and past the Earth in about an hour and a half) and at many millions of degrees (your choice of C or F). We certainly would be dying if our Sun did that!

It took me a while to realise this, but after a walk through road-insurance laws yesterday it kind of clarified. The lawyers concerned with our end are very much along Jeremy Malcolm’s high-tide mark: clear, simple, determined and as honest as they could be within the existing law. Now... what do I mean by that cute little turn of phrase? On the surface, the answer is quite simple: the laws we are dealing with are kind of bonkers. Scratch the surface in most parts, and it all goes wonky. I’ve heard people complaining about this or that odd chunk of law — for a clear, modern example, I know of one African country that has a death penalty for the second drink-driving offence . Why? Because drink-drivers were accidentally-ish killing many victims, and the lawmakers wanted the situation to be a little fairer: they wanted the offender to be the one to suffer, if anyone. So... on the first offence, the policemen writes your name in a logbook, then carefully drives you home — on the second o

Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt. — Lev Landau (Russian physicist) The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. — Albert Einstein Scientific research consists in seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Nobel Prize 1937) A theoretical physicist is a physicist without the ability to perform real experiments. A mathematical physicist is a mathematician without the ability to perform real mathematics. — David Mermin An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. — Niels Henrik David Bohr More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency, without necessarily achieving it, than for any other single reason -- including blind stupidity. — WA Wulf There’s a reason physicists are so successful with what they do, and that is they study the hydrogen atom and the helium ion and then they stop. — Richard Feynman It is nothing short

It seems that Voyager II has had an early heliopause , running out of magnetism about 10% (a billion and a half kilometers!) earlier than Voyager I. The implication is that our heliosphere and the heliopause around it are much more variable and flexible than was once thought. “Well—” I feel impelled to ask —“after so much else astronomical has been found to be variable and different in recent weeks and months, why is this such a big surprise?” We’ve recently found meteors and comets — and other spacey things — doing bundles of “impossible” stuff, all in defiance of official explanations. Whooh! Here’s a revolution: we’re expecting from dud concepts, so let’s change our official expectations ! (-: Too much politics and philosophy involved for it ever to be that simple, of course, but we won’t really know without a good, strong try.

This sun is setting through the bushfire smoke north of Joondalup, from fires to the east-north-east of Wanneroo. It adds a strident kind of pinkish shade to everything in the neighbourhood.

...because it may help significantly in healing you, say a brace of research nurses on experiments across many people. Their results run up to ≈1/4 decrease in pain simply from listening to music for an hour a day, versus a few percent increase; and ≈1/5 decrease in disablement.

This was almost within my cooking — er... talents — :-) Last night, we-all had some pasta strands for food, gently boiled, with beans & corn & tomatoey stuff that all went together nicely & filled the whole hole. This norning, breakfast looked uninspiring: choice of toast or cereal — so I upended the remaining meal-stuff into a flat ceramic bowl, slid that under the stove’s top-down griller until it melted & ran, then whooshed it out and sprinkled a little Hit Chilli Sauce thereon as the perfect (well, excellent) refinement. Spaghetti-done-backwards (cooked top-down) made a surprisingly tasty & filling breakfast — the chilli being positive, indirect evidence for my stomach being... er, fundamentally operative by now — thoroughly filling & tasty; unlike even the allegedly high-quality canned stuff.

It seems that even the Billopolist can be UserFriendlied into confessing the obvious. Well done, Iliad! (-:

Miss Dinosaur also rides a stationary bike — how well? She could do it backwards! In fact... she is here. I’m sort of lazily wondering when (or indeed if) there is going to be a metamorphosis so those pedals spin clockwise from this side.

Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing [...] It provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text. Amazing! I might even be able to draw neatly, thanks to the wonders of modern FOSS technology...

Is my considered opinion that the blah reaction to Daniel Stone’s recent X post is lacking a sizeable chunk of insight. For the first time in a little while (months/years?), X is lifting its feet for some big moves and they seem to be sensible strides, stuff which will not only make the next X implementation superb, but lay the groundwork for making the few after that happen with breathtaking speed, features and reliability. So... the reaction to show is not so much “I see” so much as “I X”. Part of the structural vacuum being drawn here — I think — will absolutely ace a lot of the graphics preparation being laid down right now by other people’s display systems. Put another way, this Christmas’s X displays are going to be shockingly effective: fast, solid and flexible — & I suspect will remain major pack-leaders for a very long time to come.

600,000 new messages (and climbing) in my FDNS box as at now. It would be good if y'all never, ever responded to a spam message in your entire life. Make it totally profitless for the silly beetles and maybe they'll give up and stop?

The reports of Galileo’s disagreement with the church over Heliocentrism have echoes in today’s Open Source world. Galileo was faced by a Roman Catholic Church recently blindsided by the Reformation, and the ideas he was upholding were not science, per se (he actually held back on some extra science for church-political reasons based on Pope Urban 7’s reasoning but was not officially rehabilitated until the notorious Benedict 14’s reign), but were in essence a Pagan belief from Aristotle, long officially adopted by Augustine. So what Galileo was gently trying to do was to convince the RCC to adhere to its own official policies — a risky action at the best of times. As anyone with a whisker of understanding of human nature might guess, this provoked a great deal of internal resentment, and landed Galileo under House Arrest. So Galileo was aiming to have the Powers That Be start making sense — which is essentially the same as the mission of the Open Source movement, and in particular o

This Japanese domestic invention (known as a “Toyota Master Ace Surf”) was carefully repaired by a local (Wanneroo) mechanic, C & A Autos Mobile Workshop. These people deduced and completely fixed the real electrical problem which had completely evaded another reknowned commercial mechanic and two auto electricians. The “excellent” applies to the support rather than to the van itself; it fits in the most amazing places, has the smallest turning-circle I’ve ever seen in any 4WD and prety reasonable ground clearance for a van, but was not designed to last forever, or really for driving Australia’s no-holds-barred for-real bush. The fault which C & A fixed was a complex little fault in the wiring harness which had completely killed a huge 770-style battery (the largest one which will fit into this van), and the best the others had suggested was replacing the battery. C & A showed me the electrical fault, and said replacement suggestions would have been dead within a week — p

The Kalahari contains an interesting crater which — it appears — was formed by a 25cm-diameter unconventional meteorite. Which has survived pretty much intact. That is, of course, impossible to standard meteorite theory in many ways, as is the meteorite — substantially different to anything else in the known-rogue’s gallery. Big surprise, not... (-: the approach is “The specific concentrations of platinum group elements in the newfound 10-inch (25 centimeter) meteorite place it in the "LL-ordinary chondrite" group of meteorites. ↵ But other characteristics set it apart from the group, such as having silicate and sulfide minerals rich in iron, but no metallic iron-nickel phase. ↵ "So it is ‘another kind’ of LL-ordinary chondrite that we do not have in our collections," said study co-author Alexander Shukolyukov of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego. ↵ A potential implication of this odd meteorite, he said, is that th

It seems that comet SW-3 will be back... in pieces... in 2022... which might put a horizon on any “defend cities against meteors” schemes which might (or might not yet) be afoot. One thing which the article mentions which points directly at charge separation as a splitting-up mechanism [all bolding mine] is: Caltech scientist William Reach, who led the Spitzer observations, said they might change expectations for 2022. Reach said it is unlikely the 2022 event will be a major one like the spectacular Leonid meteor showers in recent years. "But the door's open," Reach said in a telephone interview. He said the big chunks coming off the comet move backward before dispersing, something that is not predicted in existing computer models . So to forecast what Earth will plow through in 2022 will now require some reworking of the models. Images and data of the comet provided recently by the Hubble Space Telescope will also go into that effort, he said. ...and much more. An i

Looks like Aus is bidding for the Giant Magellan Telescope and would site it officially in the Murchison region if they/we win the bid. Compared with Perth, that’s half-a-day into the bush. Still, it sounds reasonably close... until one discovers that some sensors attached to this 21m ’scope may be as far away as New Zealand. Reading between the lines of what I was told at Bickley Observatory a year or so ago, the people who run that facility in some way knew that something like this was written into their future, although the words used for the location weren’t as precise as “The Murchison”. Aside from being locallish, The Murchison would be well-equipped to support such a scope, because as well as many facilities for industry and mining, and being radio-ly quiet it is also optically “quiet” (and dryish weather) so would be an excellent place for a combined optical/radio facility. There's also a ground-monitoring facility set up a little way in that general direction; perhaps the

While searching for the origin of atmnospheric Gamma radiation, researchers looked high, where gamma radiation stood a chance of surviving long enough to have an effect but Real Life was — as it often is — a little different: the Gamma rays were being formed within a few kilometers of the ground — or in other words, down near us . The original search was for Gamma emissions triggered by lightning, but to the researchers’ surprise, it turns out to be the other way around: Gamma radiation is causing lightning. The consequences of this haven’t yet been worked out, but I guess that a means for predicting and/or neutralising dangerous discharges of lightning and/or radiation will eventuate. Generally, it sounds like debugging software: Real Life is typically stranger than fiction. (-:

Well, not precisely cyclonic but very windy, thundery and to a certain extent rainy. The street is flowing quite enthusiasctially downhill, and it definitely ain’t walking weather — at least, not without a decent skinsuit. I guess Autumn is definitely here, now. (-:

Somebody’s being unrealistic with their rating systems, and bequeathing this unrealismn to people like Ben . Brasil is not perfect, but has out-engineered the USA in many important ways (Alco fuel, aircraft, AIDS drugs, etc ad infinitum), and has managed to untangle rights and reasons a good deal more clearly. Brasil was producing AIDS drugs to export to Africa, the USA DoT was leaning on them to stop — on behalf of the owner of a US drug company who also owns a large software firm. Brasil hasn’t suffered the same military mass addictiom as the USA, but what they have works remarkably well, kilo for kilo, and again while the society behind this still isn’t perfect, they’ve already done relatively splendidy with what they were left with. Their population is concentrated along the coasts for very simple reasons like “the rest is full of jungle/river/rocks/etc” rather than to make political capital somewhere, as is more typical in the USA. For a country which has been invaded by European

Compare your own, um, issues with this one before getting overly self-involved.

Did they plan it?

Found a bunch of ~6000 email entries telling me — a classic message — that I had no space in which to store email messages (this is what happens when you open an unlimited download of assorted legal DVD contents, then get run over within a day or two so the download can ramp up to tens of gigabytes in a few days, ie, well before one heals). That discovery decreased my email queue by nearly 10%; so, who knows? I may yet send out real numbers of real email responses by the end of this week! Only sixty-odd thousand left to read in my main account ...

Heinrich Päs (U Wuerzburg, .de) got bored with weighting for time (since gravity is now potentially switchable), and took a few shortcuts so now he can “find a metric where the null, weak and dominant energy conditions are violated in the bulk, but satisfied on the brane” which means that he can then deal with “gravitons or gauge-singlet (“sterile”) fermions propagating in the extra dimension [which] may be manipulated in a way to test the chronology protection”. To put this in another, simpler way: Heinrich can “travel” in time — or to put it a third, slightly less charicatured way: Heinrich can measure parts of reality which exist in a different time-frame. And as well as another scientist (a German-sounding American, it seems) participating, it turns out that Hawaii (the US equivalent of Australia’s neighbour New Zealand in many ways, including having odd collections of beasties) has contributed a scientist of their own — one Sandip Pakvasa — to help make this all possible (at t

An apparent gravitic field was measured for the European Space Agency recently, by accelerometers near a rotating superconductor (which was in its turn producing a magnetic field called a “London Moment”). It demonstrates that a superconductive gyroscope is capable of generating a powerful gravitomagnetic field, and is therefore the gravitational counterpart of the magnetic coil. ...and... Although just 100 millionths of the acceleration due to the Earth's gravitational field, the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. So, how’d you be? Able to turn gravity on an off like a solenoid? Perfect for those days when one awakens feeling grotty and heavy, no?

On opening my email recently during initial recovery, I discovered 77,000 pieces of email in my main account. Yes, that would be why I haven’t replied to you yet. The vast majority of these are spam — despite filtering — and despite about 80% of all inbound email having been bounced, mainly due to odd combinations of changes made by my ISP and a couple of gurus who tinkered while I was out of things for a couple of months. One piece of spam in particular caught my eye: it is addressed to Pia Smith (obviously, they missed the change to Waugh) in a domain which AFAICT has never published any form of her name. Yes, that includes invisibly and as text in an image. WTF? It seems that the spammer in question has a planet orbiting backwards, lop-ended etc as well. Maybe through its brain.

Some of our Kuiper/Oort objects are kind of weird and drive home the message of distance between “real life” and what physics actually does. One of these planets is near twice as long as it is wide, and constantly spinning end-over-endish. If that were to happen in (y)our backyard, you’d expect it to wind to a halt fairly shortly... but out well beyond Pluto, there’s essentially nothing to slow spinning rocks down. So they keep right on spinning (weird or boring though it might be) until something hits them. The two objects mentioned orbiting each other in the article are so remote and dim that we hadn’t been able to size them, weigh them, or even reliably colour them. And this is right in our astronomical back yard, too.

It seems that the fluffy comet emits lots of X radiation . How? The article says “charge exchange” which would be as close to an official admission that comets do carry real electrical charges as I have ever seen. So at least some progress is being made. I’m sort of idly wondering if there is a connection between this and its crumbliness.

A local PC supplier is selling 1GB Flash cards for $50 apiece. Admittedly, this is 100x as expensive as an individual floppy disk, but it is a danged sight more portable, holds about 1,000x as much data (and do it faster and with less media changes) and at $16 for a USB2 card, the interface is actually cheaper than a new floppy drive (at $19, that’s verging on an achievement). Ain’t no more excuses for keeping floppy drives, once I read my old media.

My fantastic mother-in-law had a brandless big soft rubber ball sitting forever deflated lest grandkids coax it into motion (and thus destruction), so she brought it across. Now I get to do back-stretching physio again: calves on ball, backside on bed; straighten legs to lift rear end, wince, hyper-straighten legs to make calves rigid on ball — relax a little and repeat six times — then relax all over, settle down, repeat all of the above five more times. Not dignified — doesn’t look it either — but it does unknot my self- wretching back and legs quite well.

So says Heartland’s pro-smoking index page — and that’s just the ones they’re willing to admit to. In Perth (population 1.4 million) that would be 140,000 people HL admit would die if all smoked. Since about 1/4 actually do, that’s a mere 35,000 people (call it a medium-sized town) from Perth are going to die from their smoking , to say nothing about others they take with them. OK, so a typical Aussie smoker admits to a pack a day and in real life inhales two. Call it $20 a day, or $7000 a year for a 10% acknowledged risk of dying slowly and painfully (and almost certainly in hospital). Does this sound like a good thing? If you last 40 years before croaking, that’s about $280,000.00 spent — what else could you buy with over a quarter of a million dollars of your own instead of giving it to millionaires? — and how much interest would that earn you a year? 5%, from a boring CBA savings account? That’s about $14,000 a year. Much more than the Dole, every year, of your own, for free. F

It seems that Heartland, who openly support free-market solutions , have sided with the major monopolist in the area of office software. Heartland also side — it looks — with other biassed major funding providers, such as manufacturers of smoking equipment — thus supporting (in the face of public policies) a habit/addiction destructive of hearts and wasteful of both lives and resources. Big surprise, HL’re apparently on good terms with the vocally anti-FOSS  and likewise Microsoft-sponsored Cato Institute . CI is a business with a setup which confuses me: they call themselves libertarian but often come down against organisations or people with policies which appear to strongly support CI’s purported basic motivation. The whispered message here is that CI’s public and private aims are different — maybe even opposite, in practical terms — which also seems to be so with Heartland. I guess their MS sponsorship doesn’t help them to found clear perspectives. I’m looking for effective ways

Big, shocking surprise and all, but so say Canadian reviewers of [ Leon ardo’s] Da Vinca Code as a movie. Amongst many other shortcomings: Each of the other[ actor]s is required by the script, and by their characters, to spend endless minutes regurgitating the so-called "factual" elements of Brown's book as it pertains to secret societies, despots in the Roman Catholic Church and the "truth" about Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene. We won't tell people who have not read Brown's book (and there are some, despite the gigantic sales) what these facts and truths are, but suffice it to say that though they are supposed to be momentous, they come across as deflated bits of religious mythology. I’ve read several detailed and justly disparaging reviews of the book (which itself reminds me of a copy of MadLib gone a bit... well, you know... mad) but this is the first even slightly detailed assessment before me of how the movie people dealt with this role

Zero-day and all , click on an MS-Word attachment and get an instant and (so far) scanner-proof bonus rootkit . Oh, joy. /ME looks up at his copy of OpenOffice — shortly to have Lotus Office file-handling included as well (as of v2.0.3) — and relaxes somewhat. Open Source is more than 100% alive!

One of many instances I saw, this in circular form. Think about it as you read. (-: If the earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball, and in the water. The people would declare it precious because it was the only one and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to behold it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty and wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with their lives, because they would some how know that their lives,

...(in alpha order) for your visit this afternoon. No sign yet, Andrew? (-:

I have no idea what to call it beyond not-dogs — as in, hot-dogs sans dogs — or in other words, there is an interesting mix atop/engulfed-in them in place of the usual steamed random pig (or functional equivalent). I am impressed that SWMBO was able to fight her way from sheer weariness (busy day) to such consumptive creativity so rapidly. A round (or in some cases a square) of applause for herself and her culinary art!

Well, according to Georgia Institute of Technology, a bioneer involves "the belief that every animal must solve a particular problem to survive, so every animal embodies a design solution for a particular problem." and a bioneer (is a person who) sets out to find those. GIT are holding a conference (this last week): For two days, May 11-12, researchers from 20 institutions will gather at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the first International Symposium for Biologically-inspired Design and Engineering. At this conference, scientists and engineers from institutions, including Georgia Tech, Caltech, Case Western, UC Berkley, the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Shandong University and the University of Illinois will present snapshots of their research in progress. The list of operations which will be reviewed is impressive, and I have seen some of these esoteric-sounding chunks of research lead into very real, practical results. I guess one could call it "

In fact, an Addonics Cypher exDrive kit , to be precise. So what would you call it as a symptom? A head crash? Rings making noises?

...and then, apparently, turns into an expanding ring . The note in question, it seems, being close to Middle C. She is the star of the show, too. [worse puns were /dev/null-ed]

Shades of his books Dragons Egg or maybe even StarQuake , if possible? — except possibly happening today and in real life. I enjoyed both books. Um, do I incite y'all to "get a wobble on" now?

This bunch of words is apparently an Australian speaking a fair bit about red shifts, er, from an unusual perspective . It makes for interesting reading; for example... If the universe is expanding, and if this expansion is causing the redshift, then we should be seeing redshift measurements all the way from zero to the farthest measurement seen in a series of smoothly increasing numbers. It should look like a car accelerating along a freeway, going smoothly from entry speed up to the speed limit. But that is not what we see in the redshift measurements. What we see are a small series of jumps. The measurements are sort of clumped together and then there is a jump, or jerk, to a new set of measurements, with nothing gradual in between. How strange! Is the universe expanding in jumps and starts? That's hard to cope with. Especially when some of these redshift groupings split right in the middle of some galaxies! Which they do. If the universe is NOT expanding, what is causing the re

That’s the literal description of what happened to my head when someone put their door in its way at some tens of kilometers per hour, part of what’s entailed behind “Traumatic brain injury following cycling accident (bike vs car door)” and the like. “Bifrontal decompressive craniotomy and insertion of right frontal external ventricular drain” described the primary followup surgery (several more intricate lines of quasi-English medical language also appear nearby). In Relveant Investigations and Results we have (included amongst others) “Skull vault fracture (L front-pparietal region) and right floor of anterior cranial fossa” plud things like “Bi hemispheric SAH” and “Left small SDH” and “Depressed fracture of nasal bone”. That’s not all, just a few eye-catching sentences amongst phrases like “acute extra-axial collection in the left parietel region” and “evidence of subarachnal haemorrhage. Diffuse brain swelling is demonstrated” I also appear to have (literally) taken a hit or two b

...on purposelessness as a cause, with some Islamic (in mostly English) background (if I get an attribution, capitalisation or something like handedness wrong anywhere here, please post a response correcting my blunder so I know enough to repair it): Humans are required to have iman (belief and conviction in and about Allah) and do ‘amal (i.e., have their iman reflected in a righteous course of conduct vis-à-vis Allah, fellow humans, and the environment). The creation of humans, and their existence on Earth, is a deliberate divine act not an unguided, purposeless event. [...] After all, it is absurd to assume that chance causes. Chance describes; chance does not cause. Even in normal linguistic definitions, when we say that two persons meet by chance, we do not mean that they are acting haphazardly in life. That’s an interesting piece of linguistic realisation... and according to Dad’s main Chinese friend, this works as well (as badly, that is) in Chinese also (and — according to so

So it would seem , at least if you count a chunk of rock over 100 miles on a side (in reality, just over 200km x jo 200km x ju 600km) as worth noticing. It may also change in a hurry, because the core it is sitting nearer spins faster than the surface it descends from . Last chance to see (well, to sonar).

CET Scan I even had a little plasticky metal strip to protect my eyes against blinding lights implied by the strong computer-driven XRays, and had to make an effort to keep still. Other than this the CET Scan felt roughly the same as an MRI scan: a little slide back and forwards through the loop, end of play, time to wander off. The lass who drove the scanner was gently but consistently reassuring, and seemed to base it all on real experience rather than canned scripting; the scan was maybe 30 seconds all up, there were no blinding lights or other obvious dischord except that the computer-drive core of the scan was so obviously less gentle than the (well, wo-)manually driven remainder that I had no doubt about which was which. Operator ≡ limousine ≠ Computer ≡ bobcat. No official conclusions were drawn during my pleasantly short presence. I was told that learned people would spend quite a while considering and measuring the results before anything official was concluded. Food Food last

SWMBO let the littlies help themselves to some easter leftovers in KMart today. Instant dragon juice. It turned our hereinbefore sweet little children into wild, cantankerous, misbehaving, whinging brats in about ten to fifteen minutes. The contrast was quite stark, clear and unmistakeable (and unenviable) in both son and daughter. It leave me wondering what other children do about non-food like that.

This morning’s wake-up call came not from a 5 and/or a 6 year old child’s voice, but from two very strident crows, about half a block away each, every one determinedly and vocally claiming the entire area for itself. Relaxing is one thing which crow voices most definitely aren’t . Then the flock of white corellas who/which generally hang out in the trees west of the school block noticed these impulsive intruders and roared over to set things right. Something like 70 or 80 corellas in a bunch does tend to reduce the vocality of a pair of crows somewhat, albeit at a price in more musical (but generally not award-winning) corella voices or a gentler-than-crows but cumulatively deafening flapping sussuration from scores of wings. The corellas chased the “alarm c[l]ocks” away for over an hour, by which time everyone in our house was awake anyway running around organising things for “dear old Dad's” glow-in-the-dark party for his cranium. I’m feeling kind of radiant...

Roughly half the size of Pluto and running at 47 degrees out of plane , this little (in relative terms) sucker upsets a lot of people. For starters, it implies that there might be many more non-coplanar bodies whipping around out there, and for seconds it imposes some sensible limits on how well an Oort cloud might fare at such distances. It seems to be headed for an Inuit (Eskimo) name, which is kind of appropriate for a traveller into such unusual and sparse places (or at least ways).

Yeah, well, it’s from 2000 so I wasn’t that quick to, um, sea this one. However, the rift typical of an ocean basin opened up 8m in about 3 weeks across Ethiopia. That makes roughly 140m each year if it goes constant, or 14km a century — you’d expect many such things to show up on satellite photos if they’d been doing it for yonks. And who says 140m/year is somehow a magic speed limit? Meckering , watch out? Richter 6.8 in 1968 (last time — I was about 7yo and probably living in Tasmania at the time), how much will the next strike be? The Cunderdin Sea? (-:

Hi, Jon Oxer! Some people have been having trouble, but many others not. I think that a copy of the error messages you happen to see happen — then pasted in by you (y'all if not Jon) as a reply to this — might help me ta figgah out precisely what is coming unstuck and where. An ISP and a few other people have done things to the system(s) involved, things which seem generally to have helped (some of them quite markedly), but sadly not always.

In theory , this means that tomorrow I discover when my cranioplasty (literally “make headbones plastic”) surgery will be scheduled to occur. This is an important landmark because it is a step toward shucking the safety stack-hat — except when potentially stacking. Basically, surgeons gently slice my head open again and carefully replace the extracted (well, “ecstracted” literally) sections of cranium over my telencaphalon (the big soft thinky part, often called “cerebrum”). This has to be done carefully because the stretched telencaphalon needs to have not only shrunk back below where the cranial parts need to fit, but even further as any surgery which touches it (as this will) also inflames it a little.

What to do when smitten by fame? Go Professional, of course. So reckons SWMBO. The shirt is from Thailand, I’m told, and so says the neck tag.

Seriously small... 3-4nm across , and to prove that it was really rolling — and not just sliding — the builders drove them across a sheet of gold and then dragged individuals around with an STM (they roll more easily than they slide).

It seems that Mr Monopoly and his team pledged lots of “charity” money in 2001 for “AIDS drugs” for Africa. What sir omitted mentioning was a few important points... One of those points being that most (if not all) of the produce involved would be manufactured by a company he had a financial interest in; and another point being that USDoT was about to start leaning on “competing” generics producers such as Brasil, and the obvious motive to assign to that action would be the protection of Bill’s drug-company’s monopoly in the field. I can just about imagine people in ( literally ) StormTrooper uniforms and carrying syringes as they chased Africans to ascertain their medical licence compliance. I guess that the absence of any viruses or spyware in the subject would be a bit of a giveaway.

And I quote : Frantz figured this was about his Microsoft software licenses, so he kept offering evidence that he was in compliance. Tennant concluded that Lawless was trying to intimidate Frantz to land a software deal. They were both wrong. It’s sleazier than they imagined. See, Janet Lawless doesn’t work for a part of Microsoft that enforces licenses. Frantz thought she did. You’d think so too if you got a letter saying “a preliminary review ... indicates that your company may not be licensed properly,” then a follow-up saying “since this is a compliance issue, I am obligated to notify an officer of Auto Warehousing of the situation and the significant risk your organization may be subject to by not resolving this situation in a timely manner.” Lawless kept insisting that Microsoft should send a consultant to Auto Warehousing to inventory its software. But Lawless doesn’t enforce licenses. The clue is her title: She's an engagement manager. That’s right — Lawless’s job is to dru

So... it seems that LynxOS will be powering parts of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's displays. The old WinNuke firing from an M60 trick just ain’t gunna be as useful as it used to be. (-: Also... unrelated dud news for Steve and his Million Monkeys argument : it won't work. Monkeys are typically much too random to produce anything like believable results. A million penguins , however... (-: especially those old Kiwi ones, tipping the scales at roughly 600kg apiece... :-)

Some very pretty to look at, most very big. Including a recent and tallish “spine”:

A lighter, later hopper within Miss Dragon’s clutches.

According to this article , I may not actually need a brain to survive and be successful. Whew! There’s a relief! (-: Quotable quote: One of the few biologists to propose a radically novel approach to these questions is Dr Rupert Sheldrake. In his book A New Science of Life Sheldrake rejected the idea that the brain is a warehouse for memories and suggested it is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past. Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance. Such a 'radio' receiver would require far fewer and less complex structures than a warehouse capable of storing and retrieving a lifetime of data. Well, that might explain the general existence of a lot of administrivia... (-:

I haven’t investigated the rest of this site, but if what it has to say about ether here is even fractionally correct, then there’s an exciting little physics experiment or two lurking in the woodwork for someone... (-:

Now would be a good time to spread firefox , what with a common competitor down for several counts and Version 7 of said competitor already accumulating a bad reputation .

It looks like SCOX have flown into the ground with their latest Court motion ; they have had a Judge agree that SCOX failed to comply with at least three direct Court orders in the case, and modulo some minor fan-dancing they appear to have lost every important argument and point — this despite their doomed legal reasoning being a very impressive swansong about nothing real. SCOX shares are also dipping (5% the day I posted) as 3rd parties see the writing on the wall— er, the floor? — er... maybe, the stock charts? Hopefully, this means that the evidently greedy, selfish, malicious and destructive wannabee-millionaires shoving the SCOX corpse along its course are running out of room to dodge, so they will soon be back to much more honourable occupations; perhaps like keeping cardboard boxes warm in remote junky alleys — if the other more-honourable box-heaters can be abused into putting up with them doing that.

Here is an interesting review of Ruby on Rails from a Java developer’s perspective. The author takes an interesting approach: a more prudent course might be to understand what Rails does well and to bring those ideas back to the Java platform Said author produces correspondingly intriguing (informative in nature but almost narrative in style) results.

Assorted Martins and Cees (Nederlander Day, it seems) have devised a way to use the integration of “biomolecular motors in nanoengineered structures” (that is, “molecule-sized motors in very small machinery”) to sort and guide individual microtubule filaments. This is seriously compact powering and control. I idly wonder whether this could ever be carefully stretched to become a truly solid-state hard-drive replacement. Kind of like a mostly-serial, ultra-fast bunch of core memory: low-power, static, difficult to jolt, no noises or obvious moving parts. Wait and see again, I guess.

This is Little Miss Dinosaur in a feeding pose, as captured by her older sister. MissD can look decorative, neat, dignified and many other good things — thoughtful older sister had carefully asked her about some unfavoured food a few seconds before focussing and clicking. Older Sister is sometimes a bit more clever about such things than she needs to be; Older Sister has had some fairly steep learning curves already in her lifespan, and seldom forgets things. This can be both very good at some times and not so good at others. (-: However — physically small though she may be — Miss Dinosaur has easily outclevered and outstubborned mapusaurus roseae personalities, so I remain confident that anyone silly enough to get within range of the fangs...

El-Randomo^WEl-Reggo has put this article up, which makes an interesting point which — perhaps unintentionally — applies very directly to the way Open Source actually works. It says, in part... Ninety-six per cent of the human body is alive. This part is composed of living, “organic elements” present in many different forms. [...] The remaining 3.8 per cent of the human body is technically composed of non-living, “non-organic elements” [...] their quantities are fairly miniscule, they are absolutely critical for the maintenance of the body's structure and smooth working order. This USyd PhD (one Stephen Juan, new to me) seems to have exemplified (possibly — as mentioned — unintentionally) Open Source in a mere two lines: the “pointless” extras typically included with FOSS are the real and internal life-support and explain why it is so hard for a traditional vulture to compete against FOSS: in essence, this is Flexible Real Life Defeating Limited Robot. Simple enough? This effec

Goodness me, one small change in one theory dealing with one body can have some widespread consequeces! This relatively short bunch of words neatly sums up pages and reams of careful reasoning. Electrical theories date back to the 1800s, before “electricity” became taboo in astronomy. They were well-founded on observations and on the proven laws of electromagnetism. In the last few decades, they have been refined to the point where they expected the findings that were so hard on the fashionable theory: Comets are electrical discharges in the thin plasma that permeates the solar system. Because they spend most of their time far from the Sun, their rocky nuclei are in equilibrium with the voltage at that distance. But as they accelerate in toward the Sun, their voltage is increasingly out of equilibrium with the voltage and increasing density of the solar plasma. A plasma sheath forms around them—the coma and tail. And filamentary currents—jets—between the sheath and the nucleus erode, p

This photo of Comet Hale-Bopp rolling out beyond Jupiter (it is waaaay to cold to melt there: Jupiter still has ice moons) has quite a hairstyle, no? Said “hairstyle” represents a big problem for canonical cometary theory: how is Hale-Bopp emitting anything? It ain’t Solar heat, out yonder here... The Thunderbolts crew reckon that any solar power involved herein is basically going to be electrical. I can sort of imagine HB dropping a kind of trailer up which a discharge might bravely endeavour to forge directly and within very few relative minutes, and while this would be well beyond the ordinarily-considered realms of solar heating, it seems to be a much more reasonable proposition than having said heating bypass almost everything between Sol and HB (think Asteroids, over 60 of Jupiter’s moons etc)... only to make Mr Comet do the next-best thing besides explode when it finally arrives...

I’ve stumbled across a page which compares Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9’s unexpectedly bright (and millions of km early) reaction to Jupiter with Comet Tempel-1 reacting to Deep Impact’s arrival. Thankfully, the observations include things like Jupiter’s own reactions to SL9 arriving. Amongst other things, tiny fragments of the comet severely ramped up Jupiter’s auroral activity — and in abnormal areas of Jupiter. Fragment G of SL9 appears to have made a big personal claim-to-fame by smacking into Jupiter’s plasma-sheath (the edge of Jupiter’s magnetosphere) a few million kilometers before phsyical impact with Jupiter’s surface. A truer feeling for scientific reaction to comets “misbehaving” so obviously can proabably be gleaned from the Sky & Telescope phraseology: When [SL9] Fragment A hit the giant planet, it threw up a fireball so unexpectedly bright that it seemed to knock the world's astronomical community off its feet

A few interesting ones on LA’s Planet today (including too many of mine, so here’s just one simple summary back) — but posts from interesting others, such as: Pascal Klein linking to Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to George Bush , which unlike so much “western”-style polliflage, steps aside from trends, promises and vague fears to a straighforward “this [is] happen[ing|ed]” style, for example: At what price? Hundreds of billions of dollars spent from the treasury of one country and certain other countries and tens of thousands of young men and women – as occupation troops – put in harms way, taken away from family and loved ones, their hands stained with the blood of others, subjected to so much psychological pressure that everyday some commit suicide and those returning home suffer depression, become sickly and grapple with all sorts of ailments; while some are killed and their bodies handed to their families. While it’s not as totally comprehensive as it might be (Yanks are far fro

A couple of chaps named Colin Bain ( Durham Uni ) and Christopher Mellor ( National Institute for Medical Research ) have been really unkind to some mini-beanbag-contents, using arrays of lasers to build literally microscopic sheets and structures out of polystyrene nanospheres and to increase our scientific understanding of how light acts on even smaller scales within crystals. I don’t see how this amazing stuff will directly invade our everyday electronics, but I presume that having exact metrics for how, why and when to build circuitry is probably a good place to start: shades of “Hey! I’m gunner print me-self a new memory card!” Just as long as it ain’t a model like HAL 9000, made in Urbana, Illinois, and it holds no songs from Mr Langley (especially not any about Daisy and not affording a carriage). (-:

AAAS announces that “if you are highly motivated and willing to work hard for what you want, your brain may be making it difficult for you to resist the urge” — and also a mind site explains that the need for reward (food, here) is effectively welded into our brains. So now, in effect, you can (to some degree) explain that “my brain unequivocally demands this of me” — you could even get dramatic and go on in terms like “you wouldn’t want me to lose my mind, would you?”, but there are a few obvious risks along those paths, hearer’s boredom, humour and/or ill-will amongst them. I did, however, get a little puzzled while researching this (BTW, the doctors involved in repairing my impact have told me — for the first and possibly last time ever — to keep up my weight) when I ran across an article imaginatively blaming ‘altruistic’ social behaviour — namely, potentially risky punishment — on evolutionary pressure. The direct connection between risky behaviour and neurological value is mad

It seems that EnnZed aren’t entirely satisfied with the title Dinosaur Capital of the World. Even the 3m-tall Hoiho-ish penguin fossils (from nearish our LCA2006 site at Dunedin (which birds — live, not as bones — should weigh roughly 600kg apiece) — don’t annoy them) don’t seem to have been enough for their ambitions. GnuSeaLand’ve taken up recyling a more modern problem: turning sewage into fuel . Goodness me, they could set up at any number of TV stations and power an entire city from each set of results!

The University of Leeds’ geophysics people have been carefully examining reliable old navigation records and discovering that “These measurements show that since [mid 19th century] the strength of the field has fallen gradually by around 0.05% per year.” Yes! Once more, it was the magnets that dunnit — the thumping big set lying roughly between the Earth’s poles definitely included . So... careless navigation or dopey technology wasn’t nearly as responsible for maritime losses as was once thought. Being the troublemaker I was raised to be... I naturally wonder what else has quietly changed scale, rate, speed, length and so on in the last century, millennium or whatever? Particularly without leaving such tracks?

It seems that tricks with pulses will slow light right down . Not much else left in this here universe that’s escaped a velocity or rate change in these last few weeks, is there?

Sean M Carroll [one of several, apparently; ours is from the University of Chicago’s Fermi Institute] is rattling our collective cage , and hopefully the outcome will be more scientific breakthroughs. Sean asks a question that I occasionally run across in very general terms: “Is our Universe natural?” — one a typical computer coder will answer with very strong negatives after two days of intensive debugging amongst frivolous new features — but here is answered very specifically. The summary of Sean’s answer is “maybe — but it is definitely different to what we expected!” The embedded detail is extensive but not mind-blowing; Sean delves (in detailed fashion) amongst a lot of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology and so on, yet without making it imponderable. His tour of the unexpecteds is quite informative, and lots of interesting (to me, anyway) questions are raised and in various ways answered. People being people, I am sure that more effective answers are available but I am very g

Here she is in (ultra) violet: And here she is in the raw— er, well... red , anyway... ...with an arm (sort of; JPL settles for “prominence”) showing, apparently one which is several thousand times as large as Earth — and like it or lump it, sunny, that’s how it definitely was at the time,

Just a random suggestion after LCA2006 in EnnZed , it simply looked like an opportunity calling ... think nothing much of it. Especially not y’all Sydney-siders... (-:

At least one of the geologists who have looked at the now-rock-growing Mount Saint Helens and its catastrophic eruption of 18-May-1980 was seriously impressed by the rate at which steam- and hot-gas-powered erosion took place. It seems that half a cubic mile of rock can undermine quite a bit of stuff very quickly when it does get enthusiastically tossed about by such forces, and can produce quite a few trees floating roots-downward in Spirit Lake (as well as a steam-blast pit a third of a mile across, and some other notable effects). [Sorry, paper-copy, no link]

A marine (AFAICT, fossils are only found associated with other marine lifeforms, and living ones are all marine) tubeworm (also pictured below) called spirorbis has an interesting habit of being found deposited in coal, including Canadian measures. However, coal is not something which is generally regarded as a marine formation, nor is one of the major deposit sites widely famed as land-bound (unless “Canada’s Seacoast” strikes you as a dessicated sort of name to be randomly hung on something seriously less land-bound than KiwiLand). However, I haven’t noticed any widely-trumpeted initiatives to place this concept any more rightly — it would be a kind of “sea-coal” to the story.

JPL is coming to terms with comets not all being cold from the start after the StarDust mission returned Forsterite (Peridot) along with all of the ice and dust. “Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice,” said Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator and professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle. The returned samples show high-temperature materials from the coldest part of our solar system. This looks like more serious overturning of “basic” solar system principles, and may yet point out more alternatives to the obsolete drift-forever and Oort-cloud-only comet models. This progress will largely be painful for those individuals betting their careers on one or the other theory, but it really seriously invites genuine new exploration and the raising of novel practical theories for testing and experiment. Comets, they said, may not be as simple as the clouds of ice, dust and gases they were thought to comprise. They may be diverse with complex and va

One of the — according to the backing sign — top award-winning nurses at Royal Perth Rehab Hospital is Deborah Brooks, which is a disorienting coincidence for me as it happens to be the previous married name of my ex-wife. As if —I&mdash need any more disorientation at this point in my life...

So says NatGeo of parts of Pakistan, and in their estimate: 9,000 years ago. Good thing that major electronics firms were not even distant dreams yet.

National Geographic again , this time saying from the site of LCA2006 that — based on local fossil evidence — penguins arose before the dinosaurs extincted: The oldest penguin fossils yet found suggest that at least some ancestors of modern birds survived the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. Heh, pretty much like the way the computer universe at large seems to be headed. Here is the LCA2006 link: Ewan Fordyce, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, helped analyze the fossils.

Much fossil craziness has puzzled me over the years, so I hope you can guess how I feel about this article from NatGeo WRT a T.Rex fossil rated at 70 million years old and still with soft tissues prominent: Soft-tissue dinosaur remains, first reported last year in a discovery that shocked the paleontological community, may not be all that rare, experts say. A 2005 paper in the journal Science described what appeared to be flexible blood vessels, cells, and collagen-like bone matrix from fossils of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. Mary Schweitzer, the North Carolina State University paleontologist who announced the finding, said her team has now repeated that feat with more than a dozen other dinosaur specimens. To make sense of the surprising discovery, scientists are beginning to rethink a long-standing model of how the fossilization process works. So... it seems like NCSU are going to be among the prominent ground-breakers with better-arranged fossilisation theories — and,