Plantagenet Penguinista

Here we see a Spitzer shot of a QUASAR spitting out an amazing array of light — everything from high ultra-violet to low infra-red. 3C273 was the first QUASAR, discovered in 1963 (I was a whole year old) & is left of the actual image; you can see the energy (colour) of the ejections fading redwards toward the right. JPL & NASA explain the flares as charged particles spiralling through the QUASAR’s magnetic field (“synchrotron radiation”). Sorry, I can’t quite step past this quip: “What a spin-out!”

Professor Stokes asked lots of questions, ran his hands across my skull to check the physical layout, booked a couple of scans and asked RPH to check on my stored head-bones. When he has all of the reports in, plus another one from Professor Johnathan Foster (due shortly), Bryant will make A Pronouncement, which will probably (I guess) mean some cranioplasty for my little head in mid-September.

It appears that Vegan input beats anti-Diabetes standards , at least in the USA. Vegan is pretty straightforward to do, too: reject anything animal (milk, eggs, and of course anything like meat or animal fat) and get it as close to raw as possible. Mountains of strawberries, mangoes and so on — ooh! sentence me! faster! — which it seems reduces all manner of odd symptoms from additives acting like weird diseases [sorry, I dropped that link].

This afternoon, I get my head inspected by the reputable Professor Bryant Stokes to see if it can all be stuck back together again, surgically. Hopefully, this will lead to events like me being permitted to drive again & eventually even to getting rid of this gently-annoying stack-het — safely. By the way, the term “stuck” is not exactly euphemistic ; the process is called “ cranioplasty ” and that literally means “skull-shaping” as in plastic-like moulding of the skull.

[various sources] The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — Bernard Shaw If you would not be forgotten As soon as you are dead and rotten Either write things worth reading, Or do things worth the writing. — Benjamin Franklin Scientific research consists in seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought. — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi [Nobel Prize 1937] An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. — Neils Bohr The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and in science.... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that ...

This is a huge blob of gas & stars forming a “galaxy” maybe 200 million lightyears wide. The official word is “The structure we discovered and others like [it] are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies” This one’s several times the size of Andromeda galaxy & was observed using Hawaii’s Subaru & Keck ’scopes. Theories as to the blobs’ origins & nature vary, typically picturing them as either blowouts from massive early stars supernovaing to “gas cocoons” harbouring new galaxies-to-be. It’ll probably become an interesting debate to follow.

This neat GIMP plugin lets you render a pixelmap (image layer) according to a variety of formulae. In other words, you can draw areas with complicated maths, for when those days of hand-shading areas is too hard or not accurate enough.

Invention Of The Day Synthetic Gecko is adhesive that works like gecko feet: thousands of tiny, short hairs exhibiting a collection of “weak” intermolecular forces (van der Waals) which are enough to stick the surface to whatever is put before it. This follows some Gecko Tape fabricated in 2003 by University of Manchester academics after the 2000 van der Waals forces discovery by University of California academics. A gecko’s vdW pads are self-cleaning, too, which compares favourably with my own memories of wrestling lengths of ordinary sticky-tape to a standstill.

Neighbour has a birthday; how do we break it to him? With a cake, of course. And a hammer. Shane does geology, which helps a lot. This cake rocks. (-:

Here is a leadin to an article explaining self-correcting RNA (not DNA). Unfortunately, I can’t post the full text, but what it amounts to is that poorly-duplicated RNA can trigger corrections to itself, as duplicating DNA does. This once more ups the amount of regulation involved in replicating living components. The summary I can post a link to says: Mistakes can occur as RNA polymerase copies DNA into transcripts. A proofreading mechanism that removes the incorrect RNA is triggered by the erroneous RNA itself. Such proof-reading mechanisms would contribute a fair bit to the stability of an existing pattern of life.

Here’s this afternoon’s weird science article, which has analysed the data rate of sight . Quotable quote: With approximately 10 6 ganglion cells, the human retina would transmit data at roughly the rate of an Ethernet connection. Despite lower bandwidth each, it turns out that the slower sight-cells actually send more data because there are many more of them. So... next time someone refers to me as “wired”, they’re going do get the full serve. (-:

...to be healed by you” (apologies to James T or Marvin G). Researchers at the Bonn University (Germany) have been carefully investigating an old wive’s tale — that honey can heal wounds — to find that yes, it works. “In hospitals today we are faced with germs which are resistant to almost all the current anti-biotics,” Dr. Arne Simon explains. “As a result, the medical use of honey is becoming attractive again for the treatment of wounds.” Now, they’re looking to do large-scale testing, based on their initial successes: “Dead tissue is rejected faster, and the wounds heals more rapidly,” Kai Sofka, wound specialist at the University Children's Clinic, emphasises. “What is more, changing dressings is less painful, since the poultices are easier to remove without damaging the newly formed layers of skin.” Some wounds often smell unpleasant — an enormous strain on the patient. Yet honey helps here too by ...

From UserFriendly : Best viewed at 1024x768 under the light of the full moon in July when Mercury is in Leo and six pygmy marmosets do the lambda behind you singing “kum ba yah”. Sid’s response: “I ask you, when will it end?”

c|net notes that MS will inject IE7 as a high-priority update... meaning that unless administrators take steps to head off this particular update, their XP users will suddenly be running the updated, significantly-changed browser — not to mention breaking sensitive web-based applications. You know, little things like login screens and the whole intranet, not to mention those many external sites which aren’t expecting an avalanche of changes amongst their visitors. Banks & the like, I’m sure you get the idea... I’m sure that they’re going to justify this as some weird kind of “service”. It fits their mind-set.

A mob called Futurelab have looked at how FLOSS works and decided that the successful parts can be factored into education. And I quote: FLOSS approaches enable the creation of distributed collaborative networks of people working together to solve problems. This might provide a powerful way of thinking about how learners might work together, within or across schools, to generate new knowledge and practice of relevance to them. It offers the opportunity for learners to identify small tractable problems and together create ultimately significant contributions to knowledge. See? Just like FLOSS projects work in Real Life™: constantly updating small components to make large overall gains. There’s more beyond that, of course, but it all looks quite promising already.

OK, smarty-bottom answers aside... I’m now a dual Canadian-Australian citizen. Also, bouncing through New Zealand in January (for LCA2006) carried an additional benefit in that it made me a Permanent Resident of Australia, which today (the last day possible, under the rules as they are written) appears to have solved some major hiccups in government paperwork. My parents were told — as they re-entered Australia — that both children they’d brought (myself & younger sister) would be Australian citizens before they achieved majority. Immigration (now DIMIA) was twice wrong. Today, a certificate arrived in the mail to say that I’m officially an Australian citizen (as well as Canadian), and have been since the 20th of July, which by itself solved at least two chunks of government paperwork problems. The poor distraught government officer we talked to today (who happens to have learned to play bassoon and/or clarinet at the same time & place as my dear Mrs) then ...

Mr Stokes had to attend to an autopsy this mornng , I’m glad it ain’t mine. I have a new head-scan appointment with him on Monday afternoon.

A couple of other scientists (an Austrian & a Pom) have done some harder research into the idea of electricity interfering with healing rates with some definite results . The Austrian researcher made an interesting (if a little incendiary) statement: “It’s not homeopathy, it’s biophysics.” In translation, “this is not vague astrology-sounding stuff, you can put a meter on it”. Either way, these two have demonstrated that electricity can directly assist or hamper healing. One wonders how edge stuff — for example, a mobile ’phone or a power-line interacts with flesh, healing or otherwise — works itself out.

The rule seems to be “If you can’t stop it, pretend that it cannot happen ” — MS’s new website drops a “page not found” message at FireFox-using visitors. Well, if by that the message means “ Standard HTML page not found” then I suppose it could be accurate. MS’s reputation for “reality control” seems to be swinging to the foreground once more: it amounts to the familiar “If we didn’t like it, it didn’t happen” message heard from monopolists & dictators over the ages. If there were fewer suckers in the world, this would be hilarious; unfortunately, said suckers take MS’s words at face value. Including their “Our MSIE visits skyrocketed [because we deliberately rejected everything else] ” followup. Ah, well, such is life. There are enough non-suckers around that MS’s snottiness will be noticed, and FireFox’s name will be heard in new places.

It seems that a couple of scientists (one Israeli, one Yankee) have found a system of nucleosomes which guide how DNA assembles. This pair have analysed over 200 sites in yeast DNA to discover the matching components. Stand by — I guess — for much prevarication on how this complicates the existing reproductive situation, & random theories about identical twins & similar situations.

Professor Bryant Stokes will inspect my skull tomorrow morning to see whether the bones can reasonably be embedded again. This may untangle a lot of medical red tape; I hope so, because while it’s not so intrusive any more, I’ve had quite enough of wearing this skid-lid during my waking hours.

JPL have amped Enceladus’ contrast here to display its southern gas-plume better. It’s not hard now to see now how it was able to form Saturn’s E-ring. What an interesting place (but not so much for ground-based telescopes) Earth would be if orbited by Enceladus!

It seems that there are many was to build with plain old dirt. Here’s a rough list in order of complexity: Cob This involves stacking wads of mud, conceptually as a wall — but in real life, choose your shape(s)! Wattle & Daub This involves shoving the mud into “Wattle” or arrays of sticks, mesh or mats. Old-style Tudor houses are built this way. It adds the complexity of building a Wattle framework, but is a lot simpler to keep aligned than Cob (if you care). Mud Brick This involves shoving mud into block forms, letting it dry a bit, turning each mud block onto its side, letting it dry a lot more, stacking the blocks on carefully chosen mud and letting it all dry. Rammed Earth This involves hammering nearly-dry mud into rectangular forms, letting it dry, then moving the forms up a little & repeating the action. Doors & Windows Doors & windows are generally made out of metal and/or wood & can be interesting forms all by themselves rather than mere bland rectangles...

...and in response, in unison: Yes! We're all individuals! That’s from the Python movie “Life of Brian” , one of many such classic snippets that no ordinary movie would dare include. Another, from a famous Python skit: This is an ex- parrot! A similar aside from “Ice Age” ; “Hey, I wish I could jump like that!” and the response from the mammoth: Wish granted! THUD [sloth, wailing] Yaaaahahahaaa! Sorry, just tidying out on old machine and ran across these.

This (American) National Center for Science Education job ad spins my eyes: The National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools, seeks candidates for the post of Faith Project Director. Er... a what? This employee will be... developing materials pertaining to evolution and religion for print and web; representing NCSE to the faith community, in print and in person; serving as liaison between NCSE and professional theological societies and religious organizations; speaking to the press about issues involving evolution education and challenges to it; counseling teachers, administrators, parents, and others facing challenges to evolution education. All-in-all, this reads like MS hiring a GPL advocate! And here was NCSE — up to this point — carefully rattling on about science & faith being different, unrelated fields. As an isolated raw tactic, I suppose it makes a great deal of sense; but from a mor...

Inconceivable! Yet... the wholesaler which sold me my TwinHead DuraBook R15D reckons that TwinHead’s 3-year warranty covers repair of a blacked-out flat-panel display. I’ll lug it in tomorrow & find out for sure. If so, it certainly hammers most other laptop warranties I’ve ever been exposed to. Into the ground. Hurrah! (-:

It seems that NASA have chosen the code-name Orion for their next round of Lunar missions. This one appears to be a good deal quieter than the original Orion project , which was a thundering great nuclear-detonation-powered rocket (also starring in Larry Niven’s excellent SciFi book Footfall defending Earth against the attacking “Fithp”).

...and that’s only so far this year . Apparently, people are using a lot of “ buzzer ” programs to find flaws. It took MS four months to respond to the flaw exposed by an attempted eBay auction of the details, and that’s apparently a normal response time for them. As well as MS-Office, many web tools, iTunes & much security software has been ‘hit’ this year. I suspect that flaws in core, seldom-updated and internal chunks of software would be more disconcerting for security people. This looks to me like a fine time to recommend using OpenOffice instead . (-:

Munir Kotadia of ZDNet concludes that common antivirus scanners are being used as test-beds by virus writers to make sure that their new, uh, “products” are missed by them when they’re released. Linux is still an unpopular platform for virus writers, I think mainly because the platform is so varied; under ’Doze, you only need to think about a few platforms, and they all run through a pretty much identical interface, which make virus creation relatively straightforward. Under Linux, most platforms are x86-based, but you are also facing PowerPC as well as the 64-bitters and so forth, and might be pushing the interface through one of several interfaces (GNOME, KDE, etc) with varying levels of security (most distributions set their interface security differently by default, and may use different login managers etc) & the various techniques for doing sneaky things (which real applications practically never do) like invisible windows or movement may not work. This wou...

Please grab , print, sign and send in LA’s petition, “Don’t ban innovation and consumer rights!” It ain’t no magic wand, but it will bring awareness to some key politicians & many others in the path of the pending SNAFU, making it that much more difficult for the greedy corporations behind these potential new laws to drag them past unknowing eyes, & easier for people refusing or repealing those laws to do their job. LA has an interesting quote from an Oz High Court Judge involved in dealing with FTA-related laws: By the combined operation of the CD ROM access code and the Boot ROM in the PlayStation consoles, Sony sought to impose restrictions on the ordinary rights of owners, respectively of the CD ROMS and consoles, beyond those relevant to any copyright infringement as such. In effect, and apparently intentionally, those restrictions reduce global market competition. They inhibit rights ordinarily acquired by Australian owners of chattels to use and ad...

This little lump of rock is getting quite toasty. With about 70,000 people at risk (Mayon has been known to toss hot stuff about 10km into the air), Indonesia is recommending that farmers evacuate — in fact, it appears to be ready to force people out if they don’t go by themselves. I’d be quite uncomfortable both with the prospect of abandoning my property — which was going to get toasted — & with the obvious cost of staying there during the toasting. Call me fussy, if you will... Sometimes, I quietly wonder what similar-scope disasters are aimed this way; I don’t expect a volcano in Perth, exactly, but who knows what else could come past? Massive water shortages? Tsunami? Disease? RedBack plague? Invasion? Who knows? I don’t sit here worrying about each or any of these so you’d notice, but I do wonder from time to time how I’d get on if something catastrophic did arrive. My most recent personal catastrophe was completely unexpect...

I was surprised by this WikiNews stub documenting — amongst other things — the House of Representatives affirming support for heterosexual marriage . The pollies in question blundered around the bush a fair bit, called on existing precedents and so forth, but apparently failed to ask a crucial question: “What is marriage for ?” With that one question answered clearly, the nature of legislation surrounding it becomes much simpler. This appears to my odd little mind to be related to a question generally not being asked about the software we use: “What is it for ?” Once that answer is clear, decisions about what to buy (if anything) & where are also much clearer, because we would better know what effects were important to consider, each way. Without that main/core answer in hand, the reasoning goes all wonky, becoming much more prone to backyard deals & hidden agendas. This applies to almost anything , not just families or software. I suspect that the p...

Well, here she is — albeit at a slightly different set of coordinates to those originally posted by me. This ground-shot is from Sixpenny Road facing about north. The festivities on the occasion all went down well (including a serious farm-style bonfire and much munchies) as far as I could tell. Oh... & ye olde Peugeot 505 survived the trip flawlessly. Yes, both directions. (-:

Heading off to here a few minutes from now, which includes this neat little chunk of rock (Castle Rock) in the Porongurups. From here, it doesn’t look many tens of metres tall, but from ground level it certainly does. Il machina hasn’t been driven this many clicks in quite a while, so I hope it’s still in good mechanical nick. Oh, well, I guess we’ll find out in a while.

Jason Norwood-Young asks if PHP has peaked and is now running down , and presents some good evidence in support of that idea. Despite me liking PHP’s rich structural anarchy & having a function for any concievable occasion, this was a compelling read for me. Jason doesn’t jump to any conclusions... PHP still has plenty of legs, and it will take quite a bit to wind it. I'm not sure what will take its place, but somehow I don't think Ruby on Rails will be the successor. For all its publicity, its market share seems pretty dismal and doesn't seem to be getting enough weight behind it to be a real challenger any time soon. ...however, he does predict PHP’s demise: “The fact is that all top computing languages come in and out of favour. Coming in to favour in the first place is a major achievement — only a couple of the hundreds out there ever make the grade. Remember Cobol? Pascal? Logo? Delphi? They’ve all become historical anecdotes [...]” —...

Goodness me! this is a good deal better than the wipe-&-reinstall typical of a hacked ’Doze server — and in fact, that’s what it recommends for a root-level compromise but it has calm, sensible advice for unhacking a box, even those facing a root-level hack and under pressure to not wipe-and-reinstall the box. And it starts hitch-hikers’ guide style — Don’t Panic! — before listing those many sensible, practical & effective steps you can take. There’s no magic recipe here for waving some conceptual wand & deftly sanitising a system (BTW, don’t trust anyone who makes it look that simple), but there are good, reliable, steady directions for safely & carefully producing the same effect using more mundane prinsiples.

LiveScience points out a fossilised reptile which apparently used a delta-wing structure to fly. Sharovipteryx mirabilis was known as having a flight system dominated by its hind legs, but as it turns out, there were two sets of wings attached, one dominating front & one dominating the rear limbs. Delta wings are good for fast flight, specificially supersonics, but nobody here claims a supersonic lizard (which would be a tad scarey, particularly if larger ones existed), just that its flying attitude would have been literally nose-high plus steep descent, & that the second set of wings would have assisted it in adjusting its pitch (angle of “attack”) as it flew.

It seems that some people are willing to change their ideas in the face of evidence, specifically Comet Hale-Bopp’s possession of much Argon gas (that concept’s a bit difficult to support if Hale-Bopp started 4.5 billion years ago and just continued) is causing some scientists to speculate that H-B was “started” relatively recently in the vacinity of Neptune, quote: the discovery of a certain noble gas tells scientists that an object has spent most its life without heating above the temperature where that gas would steam off into space In space, argon is solid only below about 35 degrees Kelvin [...] This and the absence of Neon (melts at about 20degK) around the comet hints that H-B formed near Uranus or Neptune, where heating above 20degK but not 35degK would be more reasonable. It’s good to see scientists doing more than simply toeing the line with their theories. (-:

If you’re worried about being unable to keep your life together, ponder this little point — a EurekaLert post casually mentions that: An adult human consists of about 50,000 billion cells, 1% of which die and are replaced by cell division every day. In order to ensure cell survival and controlled growth of these new cells, the genetic information, stored in DNA molecules, must first be correctly copied and then accurately distributed during cell division. Moreover, to fully ascertain that the new cells will contain the same genetic information as the parental cells, any damage to the DNA, which is organised into several chromosomes, must be repaired. So... 500 billion cells — more or less — decoded, copied, repaired & replaced every day... is it any wonder you feel a little unstable? That’s nearly six million replacements per second, on average. Do you feel productive? (-:

(or in my case, starting to work; here are some interesting comments from /. user JavaRob on the topic of staying at work for a while...) Of course, the answer is self-discipline, time management, etc., but there are a lot of factors that affect how successful I am at that. Here’s what I’m watching properly during the times that things are really working well: Personal physical factors : I avoid caffeine, because it keeps me “awake” but destroys my focus. If I’m really focused, I simply won’t get sleepy anyway. I avoid all alcohol during the week, and avoid sugary things at night, because those both affect my sleep patterns and sharpness in the morning. Proper sleep also makes a huge difference to focus... if I only slept 3-4 hours, even if I’m wide awake things just don’t seem to get done. Project factors : an interesting project that uses my knowledge/skills but also brings in some new things is much easier to work on. Boring projects ...

This adds new meaning to the phrase “grow your own wealth” — it seems that some bacteria accumulate and even refine gold; scientists have begun to get specific about how this is done, and are proposing processes that amount to growing your own gold. Star quote: I want to make a gold nugget one day, [...] Gold nuggets grow in nature, so why shouldn't I be able to make one? ...that’s from Canadian geomicrobiologist, Gordon Southam. These are Queenslander & New South Welsh gold mines being checked out, and ANU (Canberra) staff are included too. We’ve got Kalgoorlie, plus had gold-rushes in places like Halls Creek and Donnybrook, so I’d not be surprised if studies were preformed here in WA as well.

I’d seen articles about large killer reptiles found in Oz during early settlement, but now I probably understand why ’roos show up on the typical Crocodile Hunter video leadin: here is mention of kangaroo fossils found with big, sharp, well-anchored teeth and a galloping gait instead of a hop. Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroo, with big powerful forelimbs, some of them had long canines like wolves ...says Prof Mike Arthur, UNSW Dean of Science. So apparently, being kicked to bits wasn’t the biggest risk they exposed you to. Dr Sue Hand also mentioned that: these things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh Comforting words? The investigators also found another meaning for the word “duck”: Very big bird ... more like ducks, earned the name demon ducks of doom, some at least may have been carnivorous as well So... demons rather than daemons? Sounds like Terry Pratchett’s book The Last Contin...

ITWire says that Australia’s FireFox useage is up to 24.23% (vs MSIE at 69.35%). That’s compared with ardent Germany at 39.02% vs 55.99% but completely tromps the USA at its 15.82% vs 79.78%. Most other browsers are “low single digits” here, but it’s significant that Firefox is growing again after a brief peaceful run. Firefox’s shot at dominance will be important for the “lesser” browsers also, since its interpretation of HTML is much closer to the published standards and much less bound to commercial/competitive restrictions than its largest competitor. This implies that as websites become more Firefox-aware, they will be less wired-in to odd non-standards, or in other words more portable to almost anything by way of a web browser. Also, since people are there to revise the HTML anyway, why not have them do it once & well? In real life, many “Firefoxisms” will simply represent a trend towards standards; as I put it elsewhe...

Here we have a number of scientists checking universal “constants” like proton/electron mass ratio, light-velocity & String theory values — & finding them a bit wobbly. As you would expect, there is much verbal cacophony amongst scientists at the prospect of having their physics “centre-lines” jiggled about but if this settles at all well, astro-based science will have learned a lot of new, useful & predictive information. Perhaps think of the changes as “growing pains” which might untangle some old confusion and conflicts. No pain, no gain; no guts, no glory. Easy for me to say because my science career ain’t dangling in the breeze based on the outcome.

Better still, MS were ordered to play fairer from now on & the fine-rate was raised for the next offence . Now, a 280 million Euro fine is hardly going to bankrupt MS, but it might seriously get their attention, especially if they’re totting up more fines at three million Euro a day while they refuse to pay attention. This might also inspire other enforcers to stand up for themselves, and I suspect that MS working to avoid that will have a more positive effect than the fines per se.

Up to 13% worldwide, showing 16% in the USA — and there’s very little doubt in the stats about which browser Firefox is winning adherents from. One in six is easily enough to cross many managers’ population “10% limit” for electing to support a particular browser model, so Firefox support (or — more specificially — HTML standards support) should soon start arriving at many sites which are currently welded to supporting only a single proprietary (and in many ways odd) browser family. This ought in turn to make life easier for Konqueror/Safari, Opera and all of Firefox’s conceptual siblings simply by widely introducing compliance to standards (or at least something within calling distance of standards) in place of much HTML esoterica aimed at the vagaries of one closed web-browser’s ideas. This may not be obvious to non-programmers but what it means in practice is that many programmers will (for the first time, in many places) actua...

We’ve had a pair of bunk-beds delivered, and shuffled the house around to make everything (including the beds) match the people. The adjacent childrens’ bedroom is now the auction-stuff room, Xan (Small Sir) has his own room, which he’ll wind up sharing with Daniel, & Aiyana is now sharing with an empty space which will contain Arrows (Small Miss) tomorrow, after a day spent with The J’s (in-laws James & Jane & four offspring) in their home — north a few suburbs from here. The littlies are very excited about the bunks, after having played on some at Mardie’s home recently (Mardie is Luighseach’s Mum). We had the last details of the Peugeot 505’s damaged starter-solenoid fixed yesterday, but when Herself walked the few doors over to fetch it, it wouldn’t start. Why not? Quite simple, really: the immobiliser hadn’t been shut down. Herself, used to driving her Mum’s automatic after a few days behind it’s wheel, had sus...

So days NASA , after measuring it outgassing: "We were able to measure the shape of the cloud, estimate the amount of water it contained and the rate it would be destroyed and produce oxygen," says Esposito. The amount of water they saw, about a million tons, was exactly that needed to provide a cloud of oxygen like the one they had first observed near the E ring more than a year earlier. "This was a most pleasing result," says Esposito. "We measured two new distinct phenomena and found that they fit together." The mystery of the atomic oxygen was solved. At the same time, its source, the diminutive Enceladus revealed itself to be completely different than the cold, dead icy moon it should have been. Small as it is, it has an internal heat source and is geologically active. Its geysers throw out enough water vapor and ice to maintain the moon's atmosphere, feed the vast E ring, and decompose into clouds of oxygen like the one first spotted by Cassini o...

Well... it apparently has energy even when it’s ‘empty’, agree a group of physicists gathered by Lawrence Krauss, the bloke responsible for the Star Trek movie science. Ain’t not such thing as “empty” space, so I wonder how long before someone manages to extract power from it (hoik the laptop batteries into recycling). There are some genuine big names in the list, as well as famous people.

This quote from Arjen Lentz quoting “an IP lawyer” really hit my sense of humour, even got an emotional bullseye: When we take our best and brightest and put them to work litigating against the rest of the best and brightest, we shouldn't be surprised when we get passed by countries that actually make things. Now that is seriously asking the management question “WFT are we actually doing?” (-: Arjen — for those who don’t know him — has a terrifyingly good and well-controlled sense of humour. It shows through even in what must be a reasonably stressful job documenting, training people for and organising meetings about MySQL (now as “Community Relations Manager” for them). Thanks again to PlanetLA for collecting Arjen’s words for me today.

It looks like sailing is viable again , with a more dirigible, mastless sail (“SkySail” kite) pulling ships along at modern speeds, with modern fuel and environmental savings.

I see that Greg Black is mentioning problems with Python changes. No worries, Greg, just use Ruby . (-: No, I’m not a programming genius but I have used both languages and do prefer Ruby — in fact, it’s more than a preference, Ruby has been in its own way a revelation. So many things which used to be cumbersome became simple and straightforward. In fact, I’m just about to re-code an old-favourite audio application from Java to Ruby, if I can. I don’t want to bother playing with the bazillion or so specific Java bandaids required just in order to make the thing run!

Thanks, Chris Samuel, for your extra soft-dinosaur links , and for PlanetLA’s pointing them out to me. I have a problem with a lot of this manner of featured reportage, which is that the reporters’re pretty much universally ready to jump on some explanation to the exclusion of all others, typically either “the researcher made a mistake” or “it’s a plot by such-and-such conspiracists”, although with Mary Schweitzer’s reports in particular there seems to remain a definite air of “hey, maybe this really did happen after all?” Well, if it did, maybe we can do a real Jurassic Park type experiment? T. Rex on the hoof? It would make alligators seem simple & easy by comparison, but if it could be done we might learn a lot of things about dinosaurs in a hurry. I can imagine a lot of people having a problem with that. (-: However, it would free some surprising but apparently real data for genuine consideration. What would we learn?

This assurance is not one I was eager to hear from our youngest at 05:45 this morning. Especially at about 90dB... not kind to unused ears, first thing... Miss snuggled down OK for about an hour after that, then we had a breakfast session where Miss was absolutely determined to put her milk into the bowl first, then follow it at leisure with cereal — and vigorously refused to even entertain the idea of explaining why she “must have” it that way. Sir awoke remarkably late (06:40) given the celebrations, then chucked a complete wobbly over things his older sister “should have bought” but evidently hadn’t. This morning was too much like dealing with those “random” customers & the variety of insane problems they habitually raise. It’d be a lot easier to face if the last couple of days had been relaxing, but Friday was very busy/wearing & Saturday was a bit... miscellaneous. Stuff had to be rearranged without notice, for example. This has...

MSN via Reuters reports on a definitely-unexpected meating. It does indeed look like a T. Rex burger would once (and might presumaby once again) be on the menu.

Stephan’s Quintet is surprising already: it’s a bunch of five galaxies which seem to be connected and interacting in various ways. To add to this, it seems that at least one galaxy of the five is harbouring a high-redshift QuasAR , a “QUASi-stellAR” object which glows like a star but varies — & has a redshift typical of stars much, much further away. The article mentions that said QuasAR is interacting with gases within the galaxy, which speaks quite strongly against a simple mistake with distances. This is interesting particularly becuse of the many exciting changes which will befall astronomy if redshifts do in fact vary in this manner. Some scientists will be petrified about this because of the potential for massive changes — possibly in politically-incorrect ways — but the key or important point is that science can’t grow until earlier concepts are admittedly incomplete. Other scientists will be more adventurous; so: science will gr...

It seems that MS have at least admitted that ODF exists and is worth supporting — albeit in the scaled-back kind of way which typically pleads “we don’t really want to do this!” I’m wondering how MS’re going to oddly restrict what this software actually achieves, in order to present their own formats as being somehow mysteriously “better”, but it is at least heartening to see them finally driven to acknowledge that OpenDocument is important to deal with. I strongly suspect that the main point in this interface’s existence will be to prevent OpenOffice itself from being installed when the MS convertors “will do”, but let’s wait and see what happens... I’ve had to use MS-Office instead of OpenOffice a couple of times over the last few days, and things which are simple in OOo are difficult in MSO — and in some cases items like the corporate stylesheet configuration on the site makes said things effectivel...

Terry Wallis spent 19 years in a near-coma before largely recovering in 2003 , so now my mere month of coma doesn’t look so unique any more. Quote from a different report of Terry’s case: Wallis was 19 when he suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him briefly in a coma and then in a minimally conscious state, in which he was awake but uncommunicative other than occasional nods and grunts, for more than 19 years. "The nerve fibers from the cells were severed, but the cells themselves remained intact," unlike Schiavo, whose brain cells had died, said Dr. James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, who is familiar with the research. I wonder what else can recover over time, if supported and left to its own devices? It’s an amazingly cool healing process, so I also wonder how well medicine could do if we had real interaction with this. If someone with a smashed-up brain can self-recover, perhaps others with degenerative diseas...

At 131,072 processors and 280.6 teraFLOPs , you’d be scratching your head if it didn’t. Favourite quote: In software, Microsoft is at the bottom of the list, with only two supercomputers using its operating system. The software king is Linux , used on more than 70% of the total. So... I’ve got supercomputer stuff in this very laptop!

This Cassini image of Phoebe begins to tell a tale... quite a number of tales, actually. Phoebe’s entire surface is pretty much cratered-up like this, with lighter/brighter new craters (as shown near the centre of this shot) possibly hinting at a reworked thin dark rock layer over an icy surface. Phoebe has evidently not had a gentle life, not been a safe little 20km-wide rock to hibernate on while the rest of the Solar System got along with things at it own pace. It even has a whacking great ding on its head-end, kinda like the surface-blasting on Ganymede only less electric looking. Krakatoas, tsunamis & all, Earth is still a relatively gentle place to be.

Thanks to PlanetLA , I got to read an interesting blog-post from Adrian Sutton in which competition undermined & worked against cooperative efforts at his workplace. That post stands as a kind of call to invent cooperatition, a gentle competitive process in which both the innovators in person alongside every “player” are rewarded for a good implementation. I have in mind some system in which every player gets a small reward for every useful idea submitted by anybody , thus everyone gets at least some incentive to encourage (other) developers. I am thinking that some direct “bonus points” awarded to anybody implicated in inspiring or encouraging a successful developer would help, also. I’ve seen FOSS lists work sort-of like this, but... Have you got (or seen) an aimed cooperativity system which works?

What one Earth (or elsewhere) is a “palimpsest”? The official definition is: A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible. An object, place, or area that reflects its history: “Spaniards in the sixteenth century... saw an ocean moving south... through a palimpsest of bayous and distributary streams in forested paludal basins” (John McPhee). What I suspect the astronomers of having hinted at happening here is “lots of stuff” — but what it actually looks like is a laboratory-made electrical discharge area. Note the sort-of “un-crater” at the centre? The next question, of course, is “where did all of the electrickery come from?” — but of course Ganymede is a large moon right next to this huge, electrically-busy planet known as Jupiter. Looking back at the Shoemaker-Levy-9 impact on said planet, it was massively...

These craters on Mars were not formed directly by impacts — they’re basically bounces from other impacts. It’s sobering to think of a bunch of rock-holes half a kilometer across (each) as incidental, secondary accidents. It’s also interesting that many of them are kind-of paired, which at least hints at some symmetry in the primary impact.

...and as expected, she’s benefited a lot from a break free of the ongoing social inundation she goes through in Collie. Aiyana went to a teens’ camp near Toodyay — & her teen team did the best of all of the teams in this camp, including Herself exercising her air of authority with an apparently startling degree. In person, my strong (but not absolutely perfect — who is?) daughter seems to be steadily making her way through to what serves her as... well, “normal”... well, normally. Considering the alternatives, that’s quietly very encouraging for self & others.

I got to do a Mandriva 2007.0 install today. An ex-customer machine with a dead hard disk got a new life as a tunnel gateway. 2007.0 boots as a Live linux distribution, then y’all click on an icon and it installs. Oh, yes, you get to choose auto, manual or custom disk partitioning, so it’s really a two-click installation rather than one, but beats the living daylights out of a 'Doze install for convenience & speed. Other than running KDE 3.5 rather than 3.4, the basic desktop looks quite similar to the 2006.0 version, similar logos & such. I haven’t gone through & pedantified the differences in the application lists yet, but 2007.0’s a single Live CD, so something’s got to be missing to make it all fit. It’s reasonably fast for something running from a CD, though, & I can always plug it into the remaining URPMI collection for instant extra gravy if required. And PLF too if I want extra spices on top.

SWMBO’s machine has been up for only 2.5 days (mains failure), but FireFox has already racked up 415 runtime minutes. Most of it, I think, is stuff like Flash animations, since Her Lucretiousness can’t possibly have been sitting in front of the screen (over 2 days and 2 nights) for long enough to clock up over 6 runtime hours just through typing stuff and clicking on other stuff.

That would be the Volkswagen Golf “53 + 1” [yes, number based on Herbie’s] , which drives itself based on radar, laser & accurate GPS-ing — over ad-hoc courses coned out by inexperienced course-plotters! The car was thrown together as a test-bed to help VW engineers test car features, but looks like becoming “the real thing” in real life.

Part of my therapy involves learning to steady my pace in all things, and I ran across a simple, effective piece of software which helps me to do that — well... when I'm using a computer, anyway. WorkRave pops up little “micro-break” reminders every so often, and occasional “work break” reminders (every 45 minutes by default, set it how you will) with specific pictured instructions for light exercises involving no equipment besides your body. It’s simple, small, runs reliably & there’s even a ’Doze version for the real masochists amonst us. And it’s in this laptop’s URPMI list, so installation is instant & convenient for me. It ain’t perfect, but it does the job well. It’s actually designed to be genuinelty useful to RSI sufferers as well (was written by one), not just us keystroke addicts.

Given that my speed peaks (for a km or few at a time) on the freeway cycleways hit 120km/hr, which is 33m/s, I'm beginning to seriously understand why the head-medicos speak heavily against cycling, and generally much in favour of stack-hats, Even a mere 40km/hr is more than 11 arm-lengths a second, and I can’t imagine my fragile little egg-head doing so well if it got pushed into the tar at even that velocity. Yet — even with all of these worrisome numbers — cycling is one of the safest ways of travelling, and reminds me that even in a big, heavy car those meters-per-second are still singing to us all through thin, collapsible sheets of steel or plastic. Suddenly, air-cars and helicopters don’t seem all that unreasonable a choice by comparison.

Nature magazine reports that some plants have been convinced to make their own fertilisers sans the usual bacteria. The scientists concerned are working on transferring the ability to common crops like wheat and rice. Absent unexpected side-effects, this could be a boon for farmers in dry old Oz, here. And if the plants can be taught to build fertilisers, how far away is a reasonable ability to better catch and deploy water? WestOz in particular has plenty of areas with agriculturally magnificent soil but a dry climate, so I’m imagining square kilometers of spinifex suddenly transformed to lush mangoes burgeoning cereal crops. Who knows...?

It turns out that much of SWMBO’s recent stress is due to not enough ironing — as in, not enough of the ferrous stuff down the gob. It’s a subtle thing with many effects, but the proposed fix is at least very simple and doesn’t involve long stays with hospitals or therapists. This is almost certainly related to (triggered by) my own head-smacking episode back in late February, since Lu’s stress-symptoms came together en-masse at the time. Chalk up yet another unexpected little side-effect of the prang, but I’m also glad that if it had to happen, it had the grace to happen here in Perth, with plenteous medical assistance rather than in the bush, or in somewhere like middle Africa, South America or many Asian countries, where there isn’t as much (or in some cases any) medical technology. SWMBO’s impression of being asked to do more ironing was not exactly printable...

I wonder whose career is going to cop it for this hosting choice ? The MS-Office 2007 Preview is (or at least was ) hosted on Apache over Linux. Pop goes the “nobody uses it” argument, eh?