Plantagenet Penguinista

It seems that ants have pedometers which count their steps and direction even when wearing stilts or with shorn-down legs — including in the dark — plus enough mental togetherness to navigate directly home from wherever they turn up, and to train other ants how to get there. Fairly impressive for a six-legged exo-skeletal crawly thing the size of your fingernail cuttings, no?

It’s strangely appropriate to have one Jim Baen’s top authors write a eulogy for Jim , for example: The theme of both short novels is that a youth from a decaying culture escapes the trap of accepted wisdom and saves his people despite themselves. This is a fair description of Jim's life in SF: he was always his own man, always a maverick, and very often brilliantly successful because he didn't listen to what other people thought. For example, the traditional model of electronic publishing required that the works be encrypted. Jim thought that just made it hard for people to read books, the worst mistake a publisher could make. His e-texts were clear and in a variety of common formats. While e-publishing has been a costly waste of effort for others, Baen Books quickly began earning more from electronic sales than it did from Canada . By the time of Jim's death, the figure had risen to ten times that. ...there’s also... Jim used the same formulas with his new line [Baen...

The RPRH Doctor in overall charge of my attendance there has removed 24x7 supervision from my ongoing requirements. This means that I can now do frivolous things like go to the shops by myself & also SWMBO can drive hither and yon without having to cart me along every step (or wheelspin) of the way. This is still a fair way (including cranioplasty) from me being able to drive, but it is definitely a move in the right direction. RPRH’s Clinical Psychology section have also started me on Mindfulness Meditation (also called Vipassana Bhavana for its Eastern connections), which specialises one’s focus down to a specific task (initially, that’s simply breathing). This is a little different from what one might call the more usual relaxing/disconnection meditation in that it is aligned to what you are doing rather than what you might have ambitions to do in the future, and while it is very steadying it is not aimed at being the sleepy relaxation so often associated with med...

As of last night (Wednesday), Jim Baen's stroke damage has finally taken him out. I will be but one of many people missing this careful man & all of the powerful work he’s done in the support of unencumbered & reasonable authorship. If you visit his publishing company , you’ll discover that Baen Books is an EFF member, true to Jim’s staunch support of free and open markets for good literature. You’ll also see a SpreadFireFox button , emblemic of Baen’s support of real alternatives to the run-of-the-mill mainstream products. Lots of excellent books advertised (many hosted in Baen’s Free Library , too). The world is a poorer place for the now-lack of this determined and energetic man’s presence. Baen Books will continue as a business & excellent writing will still be available (Jim was wise enough to plan ahead), but any new progress & new advances will rely much more upon the combined efforts of Baen’s valiant authors alone.

See Judge Kimball. See the Judge slap down a SCOX legal machination Big Time . Experience with SCOX chutzpah has caused many people to ask questions like “ What does it take?” Here, it seems, is the answer: it would take very brave/stupid people to consider appealing this decision. Yes, evidently SCOX does have people that dense, but against this one, they’re definitely going down in flames. It amounts to a plain “ NO! ” repeated about 130 times.

With one small piece of law , Spain have made replication of copyrighted media completely legal in their country. How? When you buy blank media (CDs, DVDs) in Spain, it’s already been taxed for whatever gets copied onto it. So... buy a new music or literary CD, copy it onto as many pre-taxed media as you can afford, legally distribute same. The Spanish music industry will probably explode. Literally. With lots of debris. E.g. exactly one copy of each album temporarily sold per university.

...well, anyway: My teen has been through a fair bit in the last week or so — as you’d expect — the most recent being that she was invited to the Collie victim’s funereal in Bunbury on this Friday afternoon. That’s not a decision I’d really like to face — either way — but she’s decided to settle for a careful card instead, in order to get her very real sympathies across without the risk of causing any undue personal conflict. The to- and fro-ing at school during the week was not completely trivial, either. From what I’ve heard so far, I’m satisfied that she’s coped as well as I could expect — possibly better. I’m glad — not that she’s had to cope with such traumua, no matter how directly and effectively, but — that my teenage daughter is dealing with the many rough items so well. Not perfectly (who could be?) but well. Daughter’s AmerIndian name means “eternal bloom”,...

Heart Mountain (Montana/Wyoming), it seems, went for a holiday once , covering 100km in about half an hour. You’re welcome to your own opinion, but a mountain doing 200km/hr is not something I’d be particularly be interested in being around at the time. Apparently, lava intrusions through vertical cracks (“dikes”) into a confined fluid-layer drove the move. Kind of like the whistle on a pressure-cooker — but scaled up a little & heated by lava, not a stove. One of the scientists involved (Aharonov) reckons that the Canary Islands might one day do the same thing. Splash!

A note from Jessica Baen and Toni Weisskopf recently published on Baen’s Bar carries this description: The doctors describe it as a massive bilateral stroke in the thalamus. Jim has not regained consciousness and his condition has become severe. He is resting comfortably now, and appears to be in no pain; however the doctors’ prognosis is grave. This is of course not good, especially for such a helpful, hardworking gentleman. I’d appreciate any good will, good wishes or divine favours which you could forward/request on Jim’s behalf. This is not a perfect universe, but that observation doesn’t excuse us from being devoted to improving it in at least some ways.

OK, so Oz dropped out of the World Cup againist Italy. Here we go to buy JetStar tickets for a few dollars — as they promised — and there aren’t any. If we’d started from Brisbane, it looks like we could even fly direct to Christchurch; from Perth, not even to Melbourne (there is one standard JetStar flight from Perth to Avalon [near Melbourne] airport, but no special tickets on it). The JetStar help-person I spoke to stated that Qantas effectively won’t let JetStar do other runs. Perth (even Port Hedland) gets flights down from Asia through other airlines, but not — from JetStar anyway — via Australia. So much for “special offers”.

Imagine an American Indian tribe — in particular three families, the Smiths, the Joneses and the Chiefs. Squaw Smith “falls” pregnant, so the chief of the Smith family improves their tent by finding, hunting & adding a deer-hide to it for softness and warmth. Squaw Smith is pleased, and gestates appropriately. Squaw Jones presumably trips over and “falls” solidly pregnant herself, so now it’s up to the Jones family chief to compete with the Smiths. Tribesman Jones can’t merely match the Smiths’ improvement and retain his own status, so he tops it by hiking into the next valley and hunting down a buffalo hide for their tent. The buffalo-hide is larger, softer & warmer than a deer-hide, which pleases Squaw Jones immensely. Then social unrest descends when Squaw Chief develops the bulge of motherhood as well. The tribe’s chief looks around puzzled. He’s well-aware of how such bulges arise, but buffalo is the most sumptious local h...

This morning, SWMBO went to a local swap-meet and picked up a stack of “water birds”, that is, small ceramic bird-shaped whistles. To operate one, you put a little water in (maybe a teaspoon or few) then blow gently into its tail. The water oscillates gently and makes the whistle “twitter” instead of plain whistling. Small Sir got to try one just now, and doesn’t get the idea of how whistles work, so he put his mouth over the whistle, including the whistling hole/slot/edge itself, and blew. The whistle practically exploded, with ejected water leaving via the exit hole in the bird’s ceramic little head and spraying up all over his face and hair. I very politely held off (this was difficult) falling down with laughter until I’d safely left the room.

Pluto’s two little moons, S/2005 P [1&2] have names : Nix & Hydra. These names were picked from Greek mythology (as for many other outer bodies) & also so the initials match New Horizons, the satellite for which these moons were found (by Hubble, which now has one nixed camera out of its three main ones) as investigative targets. “Nix” (actually, it was to be Nyx... but there was already an asteroid with that name so the IAU “nixed” Nyx :-) is the deity of darkness and mother of Charon (Pluto’s largest moon); Hydra is a 9-headed monster (thought to be an appropriate companion for the 9th planet).

At least, that’ a real risk if you ’phone during a thunderstorm , both for sending elecrical signals with lightning about and for eliminating the “flashover” of lightning across your skin (ie, it goes in sans “flashover”). Ironically, the site on which I first discovered the article was bannered with an ad for “ HOT BRANDNAMEHERE MOBILES ”... context-based ad placement at its best?

Here’s an anglicisation from riflemann on SD (the original is in Dutch or French only at the moment). Use of open standards for office document exchange. The ministerial department has decided upon the open standard format to be used for the exchange of office documents. Minister Vanvelthoven: "The format of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets is currently based primarily on popular office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Wordperfect Office. Documents produced by these products can usually only be read by those products. When you need to exchange documents with someone else, you're also forcing them to use the same software that the document was made with." To reduce the dependencies on these proprietary formats, we need to make use of open standard formats. XML is a standard for the exchange of information between diverse computer systems; an XML based document is thus guaranteed to have long term accessibility to the information within. T...

This decision is being seconded by an increasing number of physicists and highlighted by that writer. String Theory can be used to explain an amazing array of physics features — but unfortunately, we’re left with String Theory itself being, in effect, non-resolvable. So we have “explanations” that don’t also bring us real answers. The reporter asks: If fewer physicists were tied to strings might some of the enduring mysteries of the universe be solved? Might we know why there is more matter than antimatter? Why the proton's mass is 1,836 times the electron's? Why the 18 key numbers in the standard model of fundamental particles have the values they do? ...and extracts the professional opinion... "With smart people pursuing these questions, more might have been answered," says Mr. Woit. "Too few really good people have been working on anything other than string theory." That string theory abandoned testable predictions may be its ultimate betrayal of scienc...

...and the Americans notice this. Well, hey! A million cubic kilometers of rock is not something one trips over & forgets, and besides, this appears to be spread over (under, anyway) the chunk of Oz which includes Uluru (“Ayer’s Rock”) and also Kata Tjuta (“The Olgas”), which are both geologically interesting features all by themselves. Kalkarindji is said to represent a Cambrian “igneous province” (which in English is roughly “a large area of similar rock”) basaltic volcanism coincided with the Early-Middle Cambrian boundary and suggest [s] a temporal link between eruption of the Kalkarindji basalts and the end-Early Cambrian (early Toyonian) faunal mass extinction event. This, in turn, makes Kalkarindji interesting to people wondering how the seriously drastic changes between early and late Cambrian faunas occurred, since that’s about where it rests, and most shapes of lifeform appeared more or less as a swag in the rocks ...

I had a little sing recently and discovered that headbutting the highway seems to have absolutely crueled my singing abilities. Not that I’ve ever been a top-of-the-list audio star or anything, but just holding a steady note at more than a whisper now seems to be beyond me. No idea why he’d do this... but the guy who ambushed me reckons that I was carrying a ten-litre jerrycan (on a pushbike? the other witnesses disagree). He then said that he’d only opened his door “about two inches”. As if I’d ride that close to a parked car? As if 2 inches was enough to give me door-style head injuries all across my forehead ( not shoulder) when I (presumably) hit it? He also made a completely different statement about his excuse for lurking to the one he gave the Police. On top of this, he complained that my bike helment had come off — as if bouncing off his door and then headbutting a highway very hard as a result wouldn’t be easily enough to do th...

No, this is not SpaceShipOne in action , but SpaceDev are in NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Demonstration plan with a ship called Dream Chaser, a resurrection of a NASA programme known as the HL-20 Lifting Body. The idea is to build on proven/existing technology rather than start from scratch, and they expect to be flying demos within 4 years. Which is pretty much instant for a modern orbiter.

Watching this again, and it amazes me that so much interplay is squeezed so thoroughly into a straightforwardly simple-looking play . Quotable quote: “Will you refrain from putting in your ‘OR’s?”

Saddens me to see that Paul Wayper didn’t draw as much amusement from the Copy-Cat article as I did. A pity, because there’s an undeniable opportunity in it. Copying a computer should tell us a couple of things, one of them that we’ve got a feindishly complicated design for something which should be relatively straightforward compared with something else which ingests, respirates, reproduces, self-heals and all manner of other stuff not so typical of an Opteron or PowerPC. The other thing it implies is that copying should be (literally) a dead-simple option compared with building a cat (or for that matter a mosquito, crab... name it) but it isn’t. This should give us a smidgeon of an idea of what to expect with an actual lifeform. An ordinary earthworm, for example, has squillions of times as many parts as this laptop, and in a much more concentrated and dynamic form — a computer should be far more simple to copy, with or without wave-soldering equipment...

This article details the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl in Collie, Western Australia, strangled with an electrical cable and dumped under a house. To my great shock, the two girls charged with her murder are both old friends of my own teenager, who is currently spending most of her time in Collie with her "bio-Mum", who is also quoted in that article. You’ll also read there that a couple of boys were killed in a traffic accident five months ago — they were also friends of my teen, and were killed pretty much instantly when a truck changed sides of the road without any warning. Not happy times. The news article also says “Police allege that two 16-year-old girls strangled Eliza to death with electrical cable around Sunday lunchtime, just hours after the trio had partied and danced together.” — and my teen also spoke with the two girls on the day (apparently after the event, although my teen didn’t know that at the time) & described them as “...

This article from the Uni we held the memorable LCA2006 at, speaks to the penguin fossils which were dug up at about the same time as the conference, & from a tad up the East coast of EnnZed from Dunedin. These fossils are a little older than archaic penguins from Tierra del Fuego, documented by Dr Julia Clarke and coauthors (2003), and are the oldest fossil penguins reported from New Zealand. Because the Waimanu ["waterbird" in Maori] penguins are well dated in terms of geological age, it is possible to use that known age to calibrate a new molecular phylogeny — or pattern of relationships — for living birds. The phylogeny shows a branching pattern of bird relationships based on study of genetic material from a range of living birds such as storks, albatrossses, ducks and moas. By using the dates from the fossil Waimanu penguins as a calibration point, we can then predict how far back in time the other groups of living birds originated. If early penguins lived in south...

This interesting wind turbine appears to be a useful blende between a propellor/turbine and an upright “tumbler” design. The rotor pictured there is rated at 6kW at up to 16m/s and does all of the useful shutting down at high wind-speeds and such, can even be interrogated “live” through a GPM phone. They also have variants which literally light up, apparently making a very effective night-time display as well as providing much electric power in a safer, quieter way than normal “wind generators” would (English is weird, the things don’t generate wind as such). No prices visible yet, but they look like they’d be relatively easy to set up in a back-yard, roof-top, hill-peak or paddock somewhere, compared to a propellor.

New Scientist carries an article which seems to be going absolutely Mendel: [...] examples of inherited traits are being discovered that deviate from this rule. These "epigenetic" effects are caused not by genes themselves, but by inherited factors that affect gene expression in later generations. The latest such effect, [...] shows that RNA, as well as DNA, can carry information from one generation to another -- a clear violation of the cherished notion of Mendelian inheritance. Man, that is going to be a revolution in a can! (-: /ME now sitting back to watch the fur debate fly. (-:

I spent a few minutes today looking for some more direct answers for my friend Major, whose views on almost anything are interesting, insightful & often eyebrow-raising, but instead I stumbled into the Copy Cat article from MSU instead. The article proposes to be pro-Intelligent-Design, but it’s... a little different. No — to be honest, it’s a lot different. (-: It proposes that all one need do to prove one’s origins concept is to copy a cat. Literally. Using only original parts. Here’s a fun snippet from near the top, to give you a brief taste for it: The whole controversy can be settled by the ordinary house cat. All one has to do is take any ordinary cat as a model and make a copy. This will prove or disprove evolutionary theory. But you have to start from scratch. No Frankenstein kitties allowed or spare paws from the pound. But you can go to the store and buy whatever you want — flour, lumber, electric motors, asphalt [bitumen] shingles — whatever. ...

This is from the same spot (Makezine) that hosted Mr Still’s unicycle snow-chains article ; it’s a seven-valve (counting the dual-half-wave rectifier valve as one valve, and counting a dual valve as one valve) monauraul audio amplifier built for Albert Einstein’s 70th birthday. It’s a very simple, clean design (uses many dual valves, appears to have ClassB power output) but I shudder to think about items like intermodulation distortion, not to mention basics like hum, total harmonic distortion and pure efficiency. It’s here because it makes an interesting contrast with (say) a fingernail-sized Flash media player or a tiny sound-card which not only does the same thing — in stereo or quad, at least — but almost certainly at a much higher quality. (Possibly except for the actual music itself) it’s a reminder that the good ol’ days are good primarily because they’re old , so we don’t have to put up with them any more. Imagin...

Miss 5, it seems, doesn’t like pizza — from anyone. So... to keep her happy, we got some exceedingly delicious Caffinos pizzas tonight — and chips from Fish ’n’ Chips, next door to them. Lovely, crisp and well-cooked, a surprisingly good complement to Caffino’s pizzas.

OK, so we are getting ducks amongst dinosaur fossils reported as... Because the bones were buried gently and slowly in mud, many of them remain uncrushed. Soft tissues were also preserved, including flight feathers and webbing—like a duck's—between the bird's toes. ...and as a “missing link” because... the preserved skin of the webbed feet shows the same microscopic structure seen in aquatic birds today. "It was unexpected to find a bird this advanced in rocks this old," Harris said. "It tells us that the anatomical features we use to characterize modern birds evolved very quickly." ...but, hey! Here’s a radical idea: let’s take a birds-eye view of the situation and evaluate the evidence again! Why not face the probable fact that either the fossils were dated too early, and/or likewise for the rocks they were found in? That might lead to real scientific progress , rather than constantly orbiting (as we are) the current (presumably wrong) assumptions which ...

Peter Mills was — er — kind enough to give me a book by this title; the section from page 51 is entitled “BRAIN SURGERY for pleasure or profit” and includes a tool-list plus a drawing of a bisected head with electrical pliers deftly removing a slice of brain. There are also detailed instructions for how to operate taps etc antiseptically (including a tool built from a wire coat-hanger), how to practice tying ligatures on macaroni and so on. The first real step (illustrated on the abbreviated page labelled “METHOD”) involves a serrated chisel and a hammer. The book includes other sections, e.g. on “Breeding COMBAT Hamsters”, it’s a pity that I can’t reasonably scan and post it. (-:

Andrew seems to be getting along ok at Motium here in Perth recently. He/they now have even more computers lined up, some of them seriously powerful in relation to his original pocket-sized beasties, and generally priced to (slightly) beat similar but ordinary retail systems. I was impressed to discover that his automotive (for at least hundreds of units at a time) systems have matured, stably. With a high-quality 2.5-inch drive in them, they're kind of difficult to destroy, which would make them pretty much ideal to stick into one's excellent Oka [I like the black one in the Custom gallery] for a rip across the Francois Peron National Park or better. I have an older-style Motium rack PC (25% of a 2RU) sitting in a local data centre, where it remains after five years of continuous service — on a Flash drive, no less, and amongst concrete dust. Yes, it arrives with things like USB. Yes, it is running Linux .

This is what dishwashing fluid does on a not-so-good day. I have no idea what the little plasticy dribbly-looking things really are, but they’re even and consistent across the whole bottle, and appeared this morning.

Yup. that’s the result (printed result, anyway) of SWMBO typing far faster than she's thinking. (-: I’m not yet sure whether we’re in for an entertaining time or lots of new bruises or both :-) You just wait, there’s going to be complaints about “stand-over tactics” now... for me standing nearby when she typoed this and doing nothing but carefully hold my breath and silently giggle... her friend in Queensland evidently had trouble with that piece of email — it took said friend a fair while to reply to it; I’m guessing that laughing excessively hard interferes with one’s typing rates, and the stitches/cramps probably didn’t help her typing speed or accuracy very much either. I can’t really take advantage of cuddly “winter temperatures” yet, either, since we had a “scalding” 5°C minimum last night. Her typoe(s) happened because SWMBO was talking about two different things while she typed a reply...

I have an interesting picture which I have been absolutely forbidden to post (here or anywhere) of SWMBO doing some ironing. Why “forbidden”? Well, Her Delightfulness is ironing some sheets... ...that are still on the bed. No, it’s not as unsubtle as it first sounds; she wanted a flat surface to photo some clothes on for auction, so had stripped the blankets from our bed and was ironing the sheets — in place — to be that surface. It looked a little odd at times and I was rash/foolhardy enough to capture much of this oddness. Forbidden, you see? On a different & more serious note, Mr Jim Baen is still in hospital & all goodwill directed his way remains most welcome. He’s been helpful, polite & odds-defiant for quite some time, and it would be good if he could remain so for a long while. He is also working (unusual for a publisher) against the currently-insane mainstream DRM trends, so needs extra goodwill to help deflect any curses from an...

Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung & Vodafone are set to ship ’phones running Linux; read all about it here . They say that “their Linux implementation will provide a global standard, and prevent the ‘fragmentation’ of mobile phone Linux” so they’re evidently not just in it for short-term marketing points. They plan to start their own (not named in article) Foundation to develop the details, set specs/architecture, retain reference source-code bases, etc. Sounds good from here; let’s wait with ’bated breath to watch it roll out. This is distinct from the existing MobiLinux ’phone systems, although Panasonic claim to have shipped “8 million” assorted Linux-based units thus far and Vodaphone speak in terms of offering “new services” with the platform rather than directly of/to any existing system(s).

The Beeb reports a new glass-like substance called Amorphous Carbonia which is made out of dry ice and pressure. From the article: It was made by squeezing dry ice, a form of carbon dioxide used to create smoke in stage shows, at huge pressure. Scientists are interested in the new material because of the potential applications. Also, they believe it could give them clues to the processes that happen in the centre of huge gas giant planets such as Jupiter. As to progress so far... To create the glassy amorphous carbonia, the team led by Professors Mario Santoro and Federico Gorelli of the University of Florence heated solid carbon dioxide between diamond teeth at pressures over 400,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure. The material was then cooled to room temperature to form the glass. Atomic analysis of the material confirmed the glass had a similar structure to silica, but is thought to be much harder and stiffer, like diamond. When the material is depressurised, it returns to...

Despite the sunny appearance of this shot across Lake Joondalup today, winter is definitely sneaking in here. ’T was a mere +1°C last night, minus (-)0.6°C Friday night — that may not yet be winter for Tassie or EnnZed, but it certainly is for Perth.

Quoting from Baen’s Bar ; those so inclined please, pray or meditate for Jim. He started a book business against near-impossible odds and has supported many excellent writers so far. It would please me immensely if he could keep right on doing that despite this health-hit. === Official announcement from Toni === Dear Barflies I’m sorry to have to announce that Jim Baen suffered a stroke on Monday, and has been in the hospital ever since. His condition is serious, but it’s too early for any prognosis as to how he’ll fare from here on in. His family has arrived in NC [North Carolina] , and are with him in the hospital. I’ve been to see him, as have other members of Baen’s staff and his friend David Drake. In the meantime, so far as Baen Books is concerned, our plans continue on schedule. The business is fine, we’re all simply very concerned about Jim. Toni Weisskopf Chief editor, Baen Books === [end quote] ===

This furry little critter is kind of unusual — it’s been extinct for 11 million years. This is kind of like the Coelacanth , a fish which was “extinct” for about 70 million years... until live ones turned up in various fish markets (South Africa, Indonesia, South America). Reading between the lines of this Wikipedia article... They are the only living species known to have a functional intracranial joint, which almost completely separates the front and back halves of the skull internally. Flexure at this joint may aid in the consumption of large prey. Coelacanths are also mucilaginous; their scales release mucus and their bodies continually exude oil. This oil is a laxative, and makes the fish almost inedible unless dried and salted. Their scales are very rough, and are used by the villagers of the Comoros as sandpaper. Coelacanth eyes are very sensitive, and have a tapetum lucidum. Coelacanths are almost never caught in the daytime or on nights with full moons,...

This little footnote raises an often-asked, often-answered (in many differing ways) question: the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, assumed 65 million years ago when some catastrophic event killed off all the dinosaurs (but apparently not the sparrows and ducks) OK, so in my eyes the question is: what difference between sparrows and stegosauri won the sparrows a place in modern history, but the “roof-lizard” not?

Responding to a ’blog post from Michael here ... I also find a lot of Big Bang scenarios a bit — well... loose-ended & arguable. Especially, I think, arguable by proponents of a different kind of Bang or anything else down to non-Bangers including the forever-universe people and so on. What it all comes down to for me is that so many Bang (or non-Bang) variants are either carefully-proposed or put up in such a way as to shoot the legs out of many other Bang concepts. This itself hints at subvocal politics. Who is right? Are any of the groups right? Is there a “right” scenario being proposed? Or even one “close enough”? Careful reading of the productions of the many teams involved (even with heavy culling of many of the whackier ones) repeatedly leads me to assess the answer as “nobody sensible is really certain” & on that basis, the idea of making firm long-term plans around any of these theories is basically insane . By using ...

1.35 million messages in my oldest mailbox, almost all spam, and counting . This is after well over 90% have been diteched by filtering. Delete key, here we come — for weeks, at least, it seems.

I’ve now been medically checked out yet again — reactions tested, head inspected & such like — this time by an Eastern States doctor. Hopefully, this is one step closer to getting my cranium (skull) stuck back in (which then implies that I should be able to dice the stack-hat & maybe even prove once more that I can drive a car). Anyway, it’s a visible progress-marker.

How long has this 500km-wide moon been running its rockets flat out like this?

I kid you not, that was SWMBO’s breakfast this morning. You really don’t want to know what I imagined a centimetre or two’s thickness of squdgy Weetbix® looking like as it was ingested aboard chunks of Vegemite®-smeared toast. My own breakage of fast was a delicious bowl of some nominally pumpkin (plus lots of other veggies & a tad of rice) soup which I have been accused of making too hot (it tastes like it has a smidgeon of chilli sauce in it, which is an item I did not touch during preparation) and which looked merely... pumpkinny.

Thanks to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory , carbon-nanotube filters dramatically extract a lot of the processing cost along with much fresh water.

This article says : Cooke was able to estimate the energy of impact, the dimensions of the crater, and the size and speed of the meteoroid. "It was a space rock about 10 inches (25 cm) wide traveling 85,000 mph (38 km/s)," he says. If a rock like that hit Earth, it would never reach the ground. "Earth's atmosphere protects us," Cooke explains. " A 10-inch meteoroid would disintegrate in mid-air, making a spectacular fireball in the sky but no crater." However, this article says : [The] meteorite, found in the Morokweng crater [...] [...] 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. [...] the Morokweng crater is a whopping 43 miles across (70 kilometers) OK... so it appears that the choice is randomly selected from "nothing happens" to "a hole the size of Perth appears". Which would you bet on?

Who’d think that a leathery-looking flappy lizardy thing could fly smoothly and neatly? This Quetzalcoatlus might have been as wide as about 18m & weigh several hundred kilos, not something to argue with. It turns out that pterosaurs have distributed nervous clusters (think “multi-cpu brains” and you won’t be too far wide of the mark) which help them to smooth and regulate their flying surfaces, and also a neat bone — initially identified poorly — named a “pteroid” which acts kind of like a combination of flap and aileron, allowing these lizardly birds to take off slower (moderate breeze), land slower, and bank very neatly without having to tip their wings as dramatically as was once thought. So a pterosaur essentially had the aereal gear already built-in to follow modern flight-control instructions — and on a lot less fuel than a Beechcraft or Cessna would need. Sorry, it’s a paper article I have here (not internet), so n...

...and if your 16yo boarder dices a bottle into the cement to force it to pop, he winds up totally and lastingly inundated from toes to tophat in pretty much the stickiest, gooiest, yukkiest and evidently hardest-to-shower-off muck imaginable. The kittens apparently don’t favour the experience so very much, either.

It seems that we now have an official definition of spyware: spyware is deceptive software that is installed on a user’s computer without the user’s consent and has some malicious purpose. Well, thanks, Bill! I’ll sleep so much better knowing that if I knew it was going on (regardless of knowing its real capabilities) or the author didn’t really regard his program’s intent as malicious and/or deceptive in any way, I won’t be running spyware... hmm... I guess that explains so much of the “non-”spyware I see clinging to ’Doze machines. Goodness me! Some people even have the gall to carp on about FOSS and trustworthiness! Aiy-aiy-aiiiiy!

In the town of Goslar in northern Germany , some paleontologists have unearthed some “small” sauropods — at a mere 6m (20') long instead of the usual 26m (85'). Sauropods are “long-necked, small-headed plant-eaters” including the mythical Brachiosaurus, actually an Apatosaurus skeleton with a mismatched head . These new variants (at “only” about triple your length) are “merely” lethally dangerous rather than awesomely colossal. They have many scientists excited because the collection includes animals of all ages (which can be compared to study growth), most of whom represent a dwarfed species (which allows dwarfism itself to be studied as well). NatGeo has another interesting article on a sauropod ( erketu ellisoni ) with a 7.5m long neck. This reminds me of a Windows version of sauropodia — large, ornate, clumsy, probably crashed and got viruses — but in its own way, visually impressive.

I’ve been wandering around finding out about a neat little arthropod called a Trilobite — particularly their eyes. A few snippets... Not only is the trilobite eye made of pure calcite (transparent Ca carbonate) which has a precisely aligned optical axis to eliminate any double image that would have formed, it is also a "doublet" of two lenses affixed together in order to eliminate spherical aberrations (as found in ground-glass lenses)! Trilobite eyes are massively arrayed in semicircular banks & even almost-circular banks of up to 30-60 lenses per row, each with its own individual retina Ordovician trilobites such as Pricyclopyge binodosa and Jujuyaspis keideli are said to have had a “large visual field” with “close to 360-degree vision” and “could see anteriorly [backwards], laterally [sideways], dorsally [upwards], and even downwards and backwards,” from one position. Further, it has been shown that another Ordovician trilobite, Dalmanitina socialis , actually has a...

What do you replace a battery with? In one company's view, you don't ; they're adding nanotubes into batteries to make then “instantly” rechargeable and last longer than the gadget which they run. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. The problem is that storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery's electrodes, so even today's most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries. The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. Hurrah! Then Schindall adds... "It's better for the environment, because it allows the user to not worry about replacing his battery," he says. "It can be discharged and charged hundreds of thousands of times, essentially lasting longer than the life of the equipment with which it is associated." Goodness, my tee...

And we’re talking about irretrievably , as in vulnerable to MS06-015 forever kind of broken. /ME is delighted to note that the regular, reliable updates continue to arrive regularly for the forest of applications which my Linux systems are still running . On top of this, updating them doesn’t involve a licence foo-foraw, either, when it eventually becomes likely. I wonder if coping with irreversible breakage is factored into any of the shills’ budgets for MS’ systems’ operating costs and/or system uptimes? Betcha ’t ain’t! They don’t even touch the VOTW (Virus Of The Week) style of damage. However, I have Linux systems which have been installed and running for eight years (ie, longer than Win98’s existed) continuously, all of which are still fully updated, virus-free — and will be upgraded painlessly to a new version when their time comes.

A chap named Hubert Yockey, in a book on info theory & molecular biology, made an interesting (and relevant, I think) claim. Once a scientific paradigm is accepted (textbooked) & regardless of any inadequacies, it is kept until an acceptable replacement is available. Yep, that sounds like a paradigm to me. He also says that in order to make progress in science, we need to “clear the decks” of failed paradigms — & this is the important part... this must be done even when it leaves the “decks” entirely clear, without any “acceptable” paradigms ; and he does go on to say that “In science it is a virtue to acknowledge ignorance”. What I’m guessing is widely happening today is that many paradigms are being supported as one supports a footy team: strongly, & pretty much regardless of their individual merits. This approach ain’t science, it’s about political & social operations. If so, then it’s ...

This Massey (NZ) Uni article hints at a scientific publication which implies that Eukaryotes ("multi-nucleated beings") did not develop from Prokaryotes ("single-nucleus beings") as has often been supposed in the past. “The article was carefully edited to review a massive amount of genomic and biological information about the evolutionary trajectory of modern eukaryotes, as distinct from that of prokaryotes — organisms whose DNA is not contained within a nucleus.” So... another major new story-thread in biology! The only constant thread is that of change?

Albert Einstein invented a factor — his Cosmological Constant — to balance the natural force of gravity with. He later described this as his “greatest blunder”. Ironically, this factor (often descibed as his “fudge factor” by other scientists) turns out to be — in some ways — within cooee of correct as a stretching value for the universe. I wonder if Albert would have thought something along the lines of “Oh, blast! I was right!”

They've even managed to coin up a geek-lookin’ driver for it. Small, fast, clean, efficient... sounds FOSS to me.

Yes, Google Mars does exist . You can drive through Valles Marineris if you like. In completely unrelated news, Caffinos made more excellent pizzas Wednesday afternoon. (08)9404-6700 if you live in Perth's northern suburbs and want one of your own.

It seems that whatever it is about this palm flower which sends the bees groggy and drunken has no visible effect on the local parakeets (they haven’t fallen — thud — to the ground or anything). The bloke who planted the tree should be back from Laos in a day or two, so I should be able to find out from him what sort of palm it be. These are smaller and more colourful birds than the middle-sized white corellas which typically inhabit the park at the bottom of the local school (and occasionally flit past to terrify the local crows into silencing their own strident ownership-claims). Despite a week or so’s enthusiastic shedding of fronds and bees, the flower is still larger than either of our littler children.

The Dot reveals that KOffice 2’s inter-component integration will work bidirectionally, which means that a sub-document is not a mere special-case reimplementation of the component’s original creator application, but a genuine sub-component — and this works both ways (e.g. a Karbon component in a KWord document is treated in much the same way as a KWord component “living” in a Karbon document). This means that the K Office Suite 2 will indeed be a suite, not a mere collection of shotgun-married loners. Yes, they do avoid following a common team (well... a common virus-bait) built around an ex-Mac-based VisiCalc-clone worksheet bundled with a warped Multi-Tool component from Xenix. Good plan, KOffice crew! Well avoided! Expect me to spend more time in KWord with 2.0 than ever before...

Imagine a microcontroller smaller than a piece of cereal, in which the full system flies (far better than most helicopters), navigates, recognises objects and fits easily into your hand. How much would NASA charge you to develop one? A couple of biological researchers have discovered all of these properties and more in a small, non-patented item which we call “a hummingbird”. Susan Healy & Andrew Hurly (name-jokes must run amuck thereabouts) have been at this NASA-rivalling business for many years... I was impressed by a 3m-tall fossil of a Kiwi penguin which might have weighed up to a tonne apiece (“no steala da fish!”) , but really this, um, featherweight contender is a serious winner in the feature-density race. For example, they’re known to remind feeder-owners about where they hung said bird-feeder a year or so ago. All of this in a system totalling about three grammes, wings and all. There are days when I rue the inability of computers literally hun...

This careful and entertaining bloke has far more years behind him than I want to think about, but he’s here today for a birthday party at “the bubble park” near us (it has an ~10m geodesic dome in it). It’s unusual to have a Ted celebration here — since he lives down near Albany — so we’ll be making the most of it.

New Scientist’s Maggie McKee reckons that Enceladus has one set (not two) of polar vents because it — er... knew — enough to rotate itself a little to promote its own stability. Clever chunk of rock, that one. Here’s a quick profile of our adventurous little stone beastie. Shown like this, it seems surprising that the jets weren’t seen much, much earlier... but it turns out to be all a matter of perspective — or, rather, “of spectrum”. The large but simple jets don’t show up on all scanners. The heating is probably caused by Saturn's gravity – or tidal effect – which causes Enceladus to stretch and compress slightly as it moves around in its orbit. But the observation was surprising because not all theoretical models can account for the high degree of tidal heating apparently taking place. Researchers were also perplexed at the location of the hotspot and geysers. "That was a puzzle as soon as we found all this activity - it's abso...

About 1/4 of the many things falling from this flower are... bees. I have no real idea what kind of palm this is, but the bees treat it like Nirvana... except that they often konk out after sitting on it for a while. They tend to bounce off the ground and fly wonkily away, so I'll guess that they finish up well despite their dramatic (non-)starts. Miss Dinosaur (not pictured) has a pushbike with trainers, now. The wheels go around in the correct direction, and very fast... I'm kind of amazed that she hasn't come a cropper from it yet (helmet always on, JIC). I finally worked my way up to joining up an unlinked pushbike chain today. Due to the many limitations consequent on the risk of me suddenly blacking out, I had to use a small, threaded windey link-pusher tool to fiddle the links — rather than a big "real" one and "real" tools — and get someone else (Sydney) to take the bike for a test-spin to check the results. Finding the dexterity to scrape some...

We’re talking about a seriously large crater under Antarctica (South Pole) this time, half a kilometer across and a bit over a kilometer below Antarctic ice. This is more than twice the size of “dinosaur-killer” crater Chicxulub in Mexico; it may have “prompted the break up of the supercontinent Gondwanaland, which created Australia, Africa and India” — so how appropriate is it that Australia’s birth is assigned to a geological punch-up? (-: This quote also caught my eye: While the meteorite that created the Chicxulub crater is thought to have been six miles (9.6 km) wide, the Antarctic meteorite could have been up to 30 miles wide (48.3 km). I admit it to be true: it’s not a universe-sized Big Bang. But it did happen... well... literally within a stone’s throw of us.

A New Scientist article called (of all things!) Globs In Space — and which, sadly isn’t on-line to read as I type this — postulates CDM [Cold/Dark Matter] particles, each particle as big as a galaxy . They’re not very dense compared with ordinary matter, but they’re an attempt to bring what we see in line with what we expect. Thankfully, science is socially variable. As this attempt to invent such galactically-obscure objects trundles along, other scientists are preparing to drive the Pioneer satellites around to check our understanding of how gravity works, and still others are marvelling that the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background] Radiation so far seen really doesn’t match any reasonable form of Big Bang (or any recognised Dark Matter theories), and are trying to figure out why not. So... objects as different as a few tonnes of comet or asteroid versus collections of bazillion-tonne whole galaxies are all coming under the research glasses. The re...

Well, now we know why the penguins came south past Oz but we still have no obvious clues on the big, blanched bears: the North Pole used to be in a tropical climate, says the BBC. “Shiver me gum-trees”?

New Scientist has a new “impossible” &mdash the Asteroid Itokawa , recently (Sep 2005) visited by Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft. Itokawa has a porosity of about 40%, versus a mere 20% for ordinary sand. It also appears to have suffered much pounding, which should have collapsed said porosity quite handily. Hayabusa scientists used the data — combined with measurements of the space rock’s size — to estimate its density. It appears to be 40% porous, or filled with empty space. “That is astonishing,” says [Erik] Asphaug, adding that a handful of sand has a porosity of 20%. “It’s very hard to get porosities greater than that. You've got to start balancing things delicately, like you were building a house of cards,” he says. “The only way to do it is to gently pack the stuff together.” Tamping down But that raises another mystery, he says, since repeated impacts with other space rocks over millions of years should h...

So... you’re a reknowned full Anime maker , but don’t happen to have the right galaxy for your story sitting around? No worries, just make one . It’s a gas — several kinds of gas and plasma, actually. Sound simple? Well... there are a few details to the plan , which basically consists of pumping supersonic Argon plasma into still, cool Argon gas to produce said “galaxy” in a laboratory. All done in Ibariki University, Japan. No supernovae required.