Plantagenet Penguinista

It looks like an Alaskan volcano, erupting in 1783 had a permanent impact on — of all things — rainfall over the Nile River. The volcano produced aerosols which lowered the temperature of the entire Northern Hemisphere by three degrees (C), weakening the African & Indian monsoon by reducing the temperature gradient between land & oceans. As well as reduced tree growth in Alaska, it also substantially reduced tree growth in Sibera. The cooling led, oddly enough, to unsual warming; so the reduced monsoonal rainfall evapourated faster, forming less runoff. Or in other words, less Nile. Since the Nile runs for well over 6,000km it had ample opportunity to be effected. This led to record low river levels across not just the Nile , but the entire Sahel region of Africa, including the Niger River . I was impressed to note activity in one of the coldest, iciest places in the world having a massive effect in one of the hottest, driest places. I’m wondering what might ...

So says Richard Dawkins . He qualifies it a little, but there it is. He blames Adolf Hitler for making it unsafe to discuss — now there’s an understatement. If we ever have someone pulling the plugs on people, I vote that Mr Nihilist Dawkins is kept well clear of the process. Then another article, in a difficult-to-get-to PDF: My strong interest in the activities of population control advocates grew during my first visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York during March of 2000. [...] I was particularly struck by the comments of other lobbyists who noticed that it often seemed that population control activities were aimed at minority populations. I began to wonder if this was mere coincidence or something more. [...] I set out to look further into the motivations and the ideology of the population control advocates. The final paper that was the result of my study and was titled, The Inherent Racism of Population Control , so struck others that I was encouraged to u...

We chopped most of my hair off today (the surgeons are going to do a more thorough job in a few days), & it reminded me of the size of my dent. On the top half of the photo, you can see a lighter arc in my hair. That’s my scalp, behind the chunk the surgeon removed. The ridge itself is a bit over a cm tall, the dent it surrounds gets as deep as a couple of cm. In the bottom half, imagine a round head rather than the squared-off one pictured; the removed bit is everything between squared-off & rounded. The top of the squared bit is soft. I’m amazed (no wise-backside comments, thanks) that there’s so much redundancy in a head. It’s only an inch or so, but it still speaks well for our ability to survive head impacts & perhaps hints at how early trepanning/trephining operations succeeded.

According to the University of California, Davis , adding the gene GPC-B1 to domesticated wheat raises the levels of protein & “micronutrient” content in the grains by 10 to 15%. Interference experiments on standard wheat crops have chopped these factors by 30% simply by masking GPC-81 alone. It also delayed maturation by several weeks. This year, US growers are trialling the repaired crops to check for problems like loss of yield or quality. Presuming that this works well, the genes will be replaced in general seed stores also. the research team was surprised to find that all cultivated pasta & bread wheat varieties analyzed so far have a nonfunctional copy of GPC-B1, suggesting that this gene was lost during the domestication of wheat. This has highlighted the value of genetically storing “obsolete” varieties of crops: this discovery provides a clear example of the value & importance of conserving the wild germplasm — the source of genetic div...

One of today’s weird items: Danes have chopped out the middle man when it comes to advertising their speed limits: they’ve got semi-naked women carrying the signs. Well — on film, anyway. I think that they might have a few more safety incidents to face if they did this in real life, but apparently it has proven effective already. Their attitude to men “exposing their bottoms” for the same cause was less imaginitive: “Maybe. We’ll see.”

I’m a bit puzzled over chess-champ-come-dancer Arianne Caoili being told she’s too good . She comes from a dancing (Philipino) culture & I’d expect her to watch professional dancers as innovation/motivation & to enjoy dancing as part of her social life. Now it seems that this & a few amateur sessions (including childhood ballet classes) are being counted as full professional training by a DWTS judge. I’d tend to follow her Mum’s view — “she could adapt easily & had a quick mind — the same skill that earned her national chess titles.” That would make her good, but not a professional. At almost anything she turned her hand to. Ah, well, it’s television; count common-sense out of it — what did I expect?

Scientists have now seriously xrayed the Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious mechanical device found in a shipwreck by a sponge-diver sheltering from a storm in 1900. They’re being all mysterious about what it actually does, but they did find lettering buried in the gears which amounts to an instruction manual for it. It is essentially a wrecked mechanical device about the size of a small desktop PC, but it’s amusing seeing 21st-century science struggling hard to untangle this piece of 1st-century science.

This story even popped up on LXer . Australia’s open source industry received a boost this week with the launch of boutique consulting and research firm Waugh Partners. It did. Some time ago, in fact, since I have a business card to show for it. One collected in person on my last visit to Sydney. Now it’s got matching headlines, too.

Mark Walport, of Britain’s Wellcome Trust explains the results of CNV (Copy Number Variant) mapping of human DNA. resistance to infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is determined in part by multiple copies of the gene CCL3L1, which cannot be seen on an SNP [Single Nucleotide Polymorphism] map The CNV maps reveal differences which standard and SNP maps miss. Genes important to the immune system and to brain development and activity tend to have many CNVs, the researchers said. They picked “1,447 different CNVs that covered about 12 percent of the human genome” of which 285 are associated with diseases. If it makes that much difference to outright disease, what else might it be changing? And here we are, fussing over trivial differences like blonde hair, skin colour, height & weight, alcohol tolerance, gender... d’oh!

Woke up this morning to no Internet. Loss! Trauma! Sat on a ’phone for a long time (half an hour?) waiting for AmNet Tech Support to come good (at a few minutes to 7AM). The bloke (“Lam”, he was Korean) hunted around for a bit then told me I'd been cut off for non-payment of bills. What? They”d hit my credit card for some tens of dollars not a week ago? Lam hunted around a bit more and discovered a bug in their accounting system. We’d been charged the money, it had come out of the card & not been passed on to their electronic accounting system. Lam fixed the electronic accounting & we came back to life about 2 minutes later. ’T was a tad scarey, as I had bundles of stuff ready to ship to the UK over the wire & so on. Comms over the ’Net are getting kind of telephonic in intensity, not to mention that we never bother reading a newspaper any more ’coz some interested person either emails us or tells a news site that we read. We...

I have my cranioplasty booked in for next Wednesday at Charlie Gardner Hospital. It’s a very minor thing, getting one’s head cut open to have a clean piece of Titanium inserted — so I’m told — but it’s not something I face with a light heart anyway. I’m also told that recovery only takes a few days, so I may even be able to drive again by LCA2007 (which requires a neuro-psych test a month after the surgery) but should have no problem rabbitting on at my education talk. Speaking of which (ha!), the LCA program looks good & the scheduling people seem to have done brilliantly at not crossing up interesting (to me, anyway) topics, so I’m really looking forward to attending. See you there!

Obviously a great fan... </sarcasm> . . . and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to the turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don’t understand and don’t care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow-prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world’s bookshelves loaded with fas...

This is the guts of a message from the Honourable Francis Logan: The Open Source Demonstration Centre was launched in August 2004 as a two year program. The Project’s lease has now expired and other tenants are due to take space in the Innovation Centre. The Department of Industry and Resources are currently negotiating with other entities to take Open Source into its next stage of promotion. ...well, “from” indirectly, it came via his assistant Dolly McGrath via DPC. I asked her for more hints about what the “next stage” might involve.

Interested in hearing from anyone who’s used InterSystems’ Caché to replace a D3 (AKA Pick) database.

Yes, you read that right, our Solar System’s biggest planet has a ring around it. It’s described as “a gossamar ring” by NASA, who explain that it’s made of fine particles, “smaller than the thickness of tissue paper”. I suppose that it’s fitting that this amazing universe of ours should have a very fine ring around such a heavy planet; it kind of fits the general sense of humour. (-: The ring was first detected by Voyager in 1979 , but the astronomers concerned were’t absolutely certain about what they’d found. This later image was taken by Galileo in 1996, in other words a mere decade ago rather than 28 years...

BlogSpot-in-beta has some new theming tools, which I’ve just had a play with. If that does anything horrible to the ’blog, please let me know here & I’ll see about fixing it.

A bunch of companies are getting together to offer flat-rate-per-month higher-bandwidth services from mobile ’phones, including free Skype calls. It’ll be interesting to see if/how/when this all comes together. “Wider bandwidth” includes remotely/graphically accessing one’s home computer, as well as more usual web & email-like facilities. 3 (AKA Hutchison) are included, as well as Sling, so we could see TV amongst the higher-bandwidth features added to “X-Series” ’phone services. Also in the crowd were Sony-Ericsson & Microsoft, so we&rqsquo;re left to presume that an Instant Messenger service will be in the mix, along with hosts of viruses. I’m not sure how I’d feel about insecurities in my intelligent ’phone, but at this range, it doesn’t come across as inspiring. Well... unless you like to feel inspired to headbutt walls all of a sudden.

The Hayden Planetarium (American Museum of Natural History, New York) is offering a Digital Universe Atlas for download, for the three most popular platforms (Mac/Doze/Linux). This atlas allows you to wander around the Universe in scales from Solar System size down to having the entire universe presented in a small ball. You can see planetary orbits, our stellar neighbourhood, or view the entire Milky Way Galaxy (or entire Universe!) from afar off, either as symbols or in some cases as neatly labelled points (e.g. “Aldebaran” marked as being a nearby star system). So... get to know your neighbourhood!

As Michael Ellerman recommended , I went & voted for a Linux implementation of the EdGCM climate modeller , and to my great surprise Linux is head of the pack, 38.6% versus 31.4% for the next competitor. Then 17%, 11.8% and the change is 1.3%. I wonder if these guys realise that doing a Linux version will essentially do them a version for anything Unixy showing an X display? On top of this, with XMing kicking around, that will give them simple access to lots of educational desktops. Why install anything when a shell account on the department’s mini gives anybody access to EdGCM? Anyway, they’d counted 153 votes when I checked. A few more hits from us won’t really go astray, will they?

There’s a new GIMP 2 book around, GIMP 2 for Photographers , and I’m wondering if you’ve read it yet? If so, I’d value your opinion. Especially if you’re a photographer — but also from non-photographers. How useful is this book to you? What are its good points? What does it omit?

It seems that parts of the Lunar crust are safer than others , protected by a “magnetic umbrella” thrown together by ejecta from impact craters, or (more curiously) comet impacts. The fields also channel solar H & He into narrow adjoining regions, which is great for the manufacture of fusion fuel & the much more mundane but equally necessary water. The water would come from mixing the H with O 2 released by mining operations. I wonder what other little bonanzas are waiting for us out there, plainly visible but unrecognised?

Guess who supplies the chipsets for all of the major game consoles? Guess whose micro-electronics division is now laughing all of the way to the bank? After the IBM-PC series, it would&rquo;ve been difficult to pick IBM as the winner of a gaming anything , but now they seem to have picked the right layer to bask in. “Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that all the game processors would have used IBM product,” [hardware division officer, William] Zeitler said. He pushes their success down to a more balanced chip design (focussing on other than CPU clock rates) & more balanced investor relationships.

It didn’t take long for the other side of the global warming story to authoritatively raise its head. George Monbiot speaks out from the British Guardian newspaper, & answers to the article from Christopher Monckton via the Sunday Telegraph ,

Some recently-formed volcanoes in New Zealand have captured a “geomagnetic excursion”, or a change in the Earth’s magnetic field. Based on documented rates of change of paleomagnetic field direction during excursions this implies that the volcanoes may have all formed within a period of only 50–100 years or less. That would be interesting, because we didn’t know of any massive magnetic field changes in that time. If they happened so recently, this implies a whole stack of new geology to learn about , including mechanisms for changing the magnetic fields themselves. I hope that this does get followed through, as it implies a lot of unrealised changes engraved in the rocky record for us to discover.

Got to work on an XP Home machine tonight, belongs to a boarder staying with my mum-in-law, and getting PuTTY to call out through the firewall was freakin’ impossible. I carefully added PuTTY as a call-anywhere program, then even shut the firewall down completely (reasonably safe, the machine’s sitting behind a NATted ADSL router), carefully disabled anything else that might claim to be a firewall & still no dice. I’ve never had so much trouble getting out of a ’Doze box before.

After GPLing Java, Sun are moving forward and GPLing OpenSolaris now. “Will you GPL Solaris, Mr. Green?” “We will take a close look at it,” Green said, adding that it was possible that the familiarity and comfort level many developers have with the GPL may result in Sun adopting it for OpenSolaris. Both men positioned Sun’s embracing of GPL for Java as an important change in the software landscape, which the company hopes will result in much greater adoption of all flavors of Java across mobile devices and computers. They’re right: it is an important change in the software landscape. Dollars to doughtnuts a certain wannabee-Linux company finds a way to sue Sun for Opening Java. Or OpenSolaris. Or something... they’re running out of fame, and running out of gambits, and that’s gotta be making them desperate now.

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci Found on Mark Shuttleworth’s site , and it typifies how I feel about having a dented head (plus a zillion & one little side-effects) after having not had one for four decades. Having a small conceptual capsule to store the concept in helps me to — such as is possible — get over it. Thanks, Mark! Thanks, Leonardo!

James Purser, you ask about why schools should be teaching values. A lot depends on what you view the school’s role to be. If the school is making up for parental deficiencies, then values are up for grabs, and everything else is, too. That sounds a little radical, but In Real Life that’s one of the goals often listed for schools, in various ways. It’s one of the reasons that the King of Prussia founded his compulsory schools; His theory, attributed to the German philosopher Fichte, was that by forcing children to attend school at a young age they would become more loyal to and afraid of the power of the state than they would be loyal to or afraid of their parents. The Western world then went ahead & copied those schools, first in the USA & then later to Australia. To give you some idea of how these schools started, the children weren’t allowed to question even the currently presented topic unless they had first raised their hand & then waited to be...

I’ve had a customer query about setting up a weblog site that they can drop emails into fairly easily. Reaching into your acres of ’blogging experience, please give me some decent hints about what FOSS (preferably Linux-based) ’blog software is available and how well it would do at being such an application. If it relaxes you and helps you to think evenly about this, imagine that this site will be attacked by authorities not being favourably mentioned in the posted emails and/or user comments. It’s all in a genuinely good cause, and in support of hard-working, enterprising Australians, but you can’t expect everyone to be utterly happy with what’s being said, even on an excellent day, can you?

Sun, it seems, are planning a GPLed Java release , in an “obvious bid” to chase Yukihero “Matz” Matsumoto’s GPLed Ruby language into international stardom. It’ll be interesting to see what a handful of the zillion or so Java developers do with a GPLed Java. Hopefully, something more wonderful than Sun have planned for it — but good on Sun for deciding to take this leap into the future. It’ll also be interesting to see what derivatives of the GPLed Java interpreter pop out on Linux desktops in the near future & besides, I’m waiting to see what other corporations will finally have the blinkers wrenched off their corporate faces & go on to GPL their own projects/products. “If someone huge like Sun can do it, why not little old us?”

The galaxy cluster Abell 3376 is dropping electric arcs 3 million light-years across. Simultaneously across a (very) wide front. This is kind of difficult to explain using the traditional “waves of crashing gas” style of guesses, but fairly simple to explain with an electromagnetic universe, of which Abell 3376 would represent one single filamentry string from the bundle. In plasma cosmology, it is the electric force that accelerates charged particles at energies up to 10 20 electron volts. You won’t see gravity doing that except maybe in a black hole or neutron star. That’s a bucketload of volts. (-:

For the first time in ages, a customer tossed a problem at me based on EXIM ( EX perimental I nternet M ailer, it seems, one of the few Cambridge projects not named after a bird), so I learned a bit about EXIM. It seems to be an interesting sort-of cross between SendMail & PostFix, if you can picture that. It has long, wordy config files like PostFix, but many of the words are arcanely structured scribble, like SendMail. It's smaller & faster than SendMail, too. Finally, it seems to not have SendMail’s iconic target status, with very few security issues. So... not my first choice — but not too bad, either.

Apparently the big feature is that “there’s Chlorine in the water to kill all of your germs”, according to Miss 5. This is an odd feature of our education system wherein home-schooled children get to sit in with swimming lessons taken by a school. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully, the funding for this kind of thing won’t be cut, like it did for Kylie Willison. This is also a first new-day post through Blogger Beta, so we’ll also see if it drags all of my other posts along a Planet with it when it goes up.

The power connector has worn out, so now I have to treat my laptop very gently & keep it plugged in very carefully, lest the connector silently die & throw it to batteries (or sometimes, instant shutdown). I’d trot it straight down for a warranty repair, only that took a month last time & I’m not looking forward to such a wait again. I’m not being silly enough to wonder what else can break.

This means that if I do it again, I can unplug the Planets first, and avoid flooding y’all with posts. Blogger don’t mention any such thing in the update adverts. Sorry. Also discovered that putting a plain ampersand (instead of &amp;) into a post now switches off ampersand processing below that in the post, whereas a plain ampersand used to come out as, well, an ampersand.

This site has one of the few working links on the Web which point to a Robert L Forward article entitled “Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors”. For those of you who don’t remember the name, Mr Forward was an exceptional physicist, to the point that other authors wrote sci-fi into his universes, including (in part) people like Larry Niven. Mr Forward also wrote some excellent sci-fi of his own (on top of countless papers on physics) including the Dragon’s Egg and RocheWorld (“Flight of the Dragonfly”) series . Mr Forward’s article on ZPE goes through the physics involved in making a “battery” which extracts ZPE from stacks of flat plates, then explores “recharging” the system by overpowering the plates to reverse the Casimir effect. You’ll see a few articles here and there on ZPE & many of them are fairly wild; Mr Forward’s article is sensible, down-to...

After a relaxing morning & a simple lunch, I couldn’t even read a clear, direct book, Mirette on the High Wire to my children this afternoon, I was so knackered. This head-injury stuff has knobs on it. )-:

Judge Easterbrook of the US Seventh Circuit has said “GPL & open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws” when backing up a decision made by the District Court for the Southern District of Indiana when it dismissed an anti-competitive charge against IBM, Red Hat & Novell, from last December. It’s hardly an earth-shaking decision, but it is an official statement from the litigeous USA, one which supports the Freedom of Linux and FOSS in general, and... Instead of being a restraint on trade, the court held that the GPL serves to foster creativity, by enabling the free distribution and building of new derivative works. ...thus it places the emphasis on the Freedom in FOSS rather than getting entangled in the corporate background. It’s nice to see decision-makers getting the main point & ignoring the distractions.

More mainstream astronomers are now acknowledging an interesting observation: asteroids can be comets too . The asteroid Chiron, orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, was seen to develop a coma and tail between 1988 and 1989. ...and... the asteroid 60558 Echeclus, discovered in 2000, did display a cometary coma detected in 2005, and it too is now classified as both an asteroid and a comet ...and recently... In a survey of 300 asteroids lurking in the asteroid belt, the astronomers detected three objects that “look a lot like comets ... ejecting little comet tails at times from their surfaces” I wonder how long before someone figures out how to “throw the switch” to turn on cometary features? Ceres , for eample, would make an interesting ANZAC Day display if someone torched it up properly.

That dead little rock spinning around our world isn’t as quiet as we thought , showing signs (in an area called Ina, at least) of relatively recent volcanic crater formation. “There is more to the Moon than we had previously discovered,” says [Peter] Schultz [of Brown University, Rhode Island]. “This shows there’s still some life. We just have to learn how to take its pulse.” This gives new point to future Lunar missions, & (should) teach us once more to not assume that we “know all about” old, established objects around us. The volcanic material might prove to be an important resource for later mining or colonisation, but who knows what else this newly-realised-to-be-active active Moon will teach us alongside that?

The south-polar ice-jets on Enceladus are apparently movable, as in, they wiggle around as they work. This rather puts paid to the idea of them being simply boiling reservoirs of water (ice) as claimed by NASA (“possible evidence of Yellowstone-like geysers fed by reservoirs of liquid water,” they say ), & points out their more dynamic nature. This nature is kind of difficult to explain without introducing a powerful, mobile set of forces to be driving it. The linked article claims that this set of features are electric in nature, which suits both the power & mobility quite well, but doesn’t suit conventional astrophysicists very much at all. It will be interesting to see how this sorts itself out.

The techniques for producing excellent bread , it turns out, are relatively simple & straightforward. Bread looks like a straightforward dish, so that won’t appear surprising to many people, but some of the detail involved in taking it from a loaf to something special could become complicated. A chap named Jim Lahey has sorted out what simply works & how to achieve that with minimal fussing around: I’ll be teaching a truly minimalist breadmaking technique that allows people to make excellent bread at home with very little effort. The method is surprisingly simple — I think a 4-year-old could master it — and the results are fantastic. The technique features: no kneading no special ingredients no special equipment no special rituals little yeast quite high (42%) moisture elapsed time (up to a day) to do the work, rather than great effort If you try it, please ’blog about your results, so we can all see.

It seems that France is looking at computer-games as an art-form , with minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres offering awards & seeking to gain tax advantages & other benefits for successful game-producing individuals. It makes sense to treat game-authoring as a kind of playwriting, I guess, and it’ll be interesting to see how it works out for France. If it does well, it sounds odd enough to become popular here in Oz as well.

A chap called Christopher Monckton has had a careful look at the graphs & conclusions used in global warming publicity, and found a few holes. For example, a big chunk of the medieval period was three degrees warmer than now, but the data showing this was cropped from the graphs. Graphs of ice-ages versus CO 2 levels were — contra to normal practice — not superimposed, for the very simple reason that the CO 2 level changes followed ice-age changes rather than prompting them. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none. ...and... The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The [warmer] sun could have caused just about all of it. It makes for an interesting read. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re avoiding global warming, just that it’s been broadly mis-reported for what appear to be political reasons. Knowing about those reasons should allow us to make mo...

Uranus’ moons are kind of unusual . They rotate (with the planet itself) about 90 degrees out of phase from the rest of the Solar System. The usual nebular hypotheses for planet & moon formation come up dry when faced with this little factlet. Saturn and a few other planets do this kind of thing, too — to a lesser extent — and also provide “little” puzzles for nebular theorists. Neptune’s moons are just nuts — one (Triton) runs backwards and is in a decaying orbit; another (Nereid) is orbiting so loosely that it constantly risks escape. These guys want new planetary formation theories, based around the widely-observed plasma effects. I’d be interested in seeing how it turns out.

Here’s a book with ambitions: [...] until recently, I assumed that astronomers and astrophysicists knew what they were talking about. Now — I’m sure they do not. [...] Earning a doctorate in electrical engineering eventually led to my teaching that subject at a major university for thirty-nine years. What troubled me most was when astrophysicists began saying things about magnetic fields that any of my junior-year students could show were completely incorrect. Electric Sky has a good, close look at what Astronomy is saying, under the light of Plasma Physics. The author also writes: I have tried to hack a path through these hypotheses, contradictions, and alternative explanations that will be clear and understandable for the average interested reader to follow. The answers to the questions we ask are not stressfully convoluted and arcane — rather, they are logical, straightforward, and reasonable — and long overdue. So... it looks like a good, clear read.

Max Plank Society have developed tape which acts like a beetle’s feet — sticking to surfaces using van der Waals forces instead of glue. Unlike ordinary tape, there is no glue left around & any remaining debris can be quickly whisked away with soap & water. Amongst many other applications, you can protect delicate glassware with the tape. “Geckos, which are heavy compared to a fly, have been using nanotechnology for this purpose for millions of years” — finally, a solution to gecko-envy! (-:

Most of the discussion focuses on the games, which are indeed getting some truly useful and productive housekeeping done, but there are some surprisingly large mods happening to less flash-and-bang applications like Krita taking place. I think KDE4 will be impressive in detail... as in, there will be lots of new items to look at, but the integration and completeness will be eye-turning. I guess we’ll see soonish. (-:

I carefully don’t plan on doing this again — that is, pasting my head into the road. Today was completely shot as well, with back pain & such. One thing I’ve said before about widespread injuries (other than “don’t do it!”) is that there’s not so much a single piece of damage that one can point to and complain about, as dozens of them. Each one sounds too minor to be really worth panicking about, but together they get a bit overwhelming. And this lasts for years, possibly for the rest of a lifetime. I guess that all I can really recommend is: “don’t do it!” I see the odd turkey riding a mini-bike or something like a little quad around our street, & they reckon it’s safe because there’s very little traffic. They rarely even wear skin-cover, let alone something “drastic” like a helmet. It takes just one piece of traffic — or none — to ruin their life... but on the other hand, they wear so littl...

I swapped jobs with my wife today, sitting on a table of videos at a school fete so she could go swanning around with the Joneses (or the Gersbachs, inside joke) & deeply regretted it. I sat in the shade from about 09:00-ish to 14:30-ish to come down immensely tired & sweaty, with a headache & fuzzy vision, & to hardly sell any videos. This is more kick-back from my head injury. )-: Relaxing now, to be more human for Herself & the littlies when they return.

“Zero Day” vulnerability not discovered in FOSS , but in an impressively wide array of ’Doze versions. Solution? Don’t use MSIE (6 or 7 ), & do disable ActiveX controls. Real solution? Be using Linux instead. (-:

...not after seeing a Russian Federal highway in action.

Earth Scientists are scratching their heads, trying to figure out how a bunch Egyptian craters arose. They’re not hydrothermal, not valcanic, not impacts, & they’re running out of acceptable & conventional alternatives. The Electric Universe people have had their eye on these craters for some time, but of course their reasons are too revolutionary for conventional scientists to accept — or in many cases, even acknowledge. Sooner or later, an answer will be found, and it looks like it won’t be a conventional one. Which is good, because it opens science to more possibilities or — to put it another way — breaks it out of a rut.

After looking at all of the Conf organisers on Planet LinuxAus mentioning that registration is now open, I suspected that a few people would like to hear from non-Conf-organisers who had registered. That’s me! The value I found in earlier LCAs made attendance pretty much inevitable, despite having to cross the country — in fact, go almost as far as New Zealand from here — and stay away from work for more than a week. As well as the voluminous raw information to hand there, you will also find the real, original authors of great (& famous within our universe) software standing around in person where you can ask them questions & (on a good day :-) get real answers. On top of this, there are many “less shiny” people & some real characters kicking about, providing a steady (well, in some ways) antithesis for boredom & idleness. Come along, spend some time interacting, go home bursting with motivation & information. It’s not a perfect world, but this is ...

Five years after its discovery, V838 Monocerotis is still a controversial topic. NASA classes it as a “Nova-like variable star” rather than a plain nova, because it’s been doing some odd things. A month after it “went off” it suddenly grew 30 times brighter in a single day, for example. It’s been a season for interesting novae . Astronomers were coasting with the idea that supernoae could be classed into “standard candles” until they discovered a Type 1a supernova forming from too large a star, & Type 2s which could flip across to Type 1. Now, I guess they’re learning something, because their discussions are laden with exploratory speculations rather than certainty.