Plantagenet Penguinista

A little research on Saturn’s seasonal ring-spokes has linked them with thunderstorms. The article walks through some interesting transformations done during the research, such as projecting Voyager images of the rings as if they were polar. Lots of fascinating stuff on how the rings (& spokes) go together & work.

For a change, it apparently isn’t connected with anything mankind has done. Barrie Hunt, researcher, said: “It is very, very highly likely that what we are seeing at the moment is natural climatic variability.” After studying a CSIRO model of Australia's natural climate patterns over the past 10,000 years, Hunt said the current drought, whose severity has led some scientists to label it a once in a millennium event, was by no means unique. He said historical data — which used air pressure, temperature, wind and rainfall information — put current conditions into perspective, revealing 30 periods of drought lasting longer than eight years in the past ten millenia. “The longest sequence was 14 years in Queensland-New South Wales, 11 in the south-east and 10 in the south-west.” So... it looks like we just have to wear this one, without suffering any guilt trips.

In addition to living in the opposite end of the planet, Polar Bears now have an additional reason to not be attacking & decimating Penguins : there’s not enough bears. Worse, they may be turning to cannibalism due to lack of food (mainly ring-necked seals). The USA is working at putting them on the Endangered Species list. The rockhopper-penguins’ problem may be the opposite: in warm weather they hit the junk-food (krill & squid) rather than ordinary fish & this mucks up their feathers, making them less water-proof. So... for your next install, maybe finish with (-: find / -iname '*squid*' -o \     -iname '*krill*' -exec rm -vf {} \;

It’s been a while since I’ve thought about these guys, which is a testimony in itself. The Book-Keeping Network have quietly & efficiently maintained my books for several years now, & are absolute experts at dealing with the myriad requirements of, for example, the ATO. Not bad for a WA small business. On a more personal level, they stepped in and arranged for a number of local providers to step in & do work while I was in hospital between February & September of this year getting my head patched up & their principal is helping to run SLPWA this year . Their systems run on D3 , a platform-mostly-independent Pick derivative, based in their case on Linux . And I’m glad it is, because it’s run reliably for a very long time in a specific way which would be very difficult to maintain on, for example, Windows. It also means that most of the machines on their LAN don’t have to panic about net-borne viruses, both because they’re generally...

The Linus Pauling Institute has found that what your Mum eats can protect you against cancer for life. Which, of course, means that if you’re a Mum working your way through towards birth, what you eat can have a huge effect on your child’s health. Among all childhood deaths in the U.S., cancer is second only to accidents as the leading cause, and the fetus and neonate are sensitive targets for toxic carcinogens. It would be important if we could affect this through maternal diet. [. . .] none of the infant mice received the protective supplement later in their life, at any stage beyond breast feeding. The protective effect of the compound came solely from maternal intake during pregnancy and nursing, but lasted into the animal’s middle age. Dosing up on just the supplement can be risky, but... the amounts of this and other valuable phytochemicals that could be obtained in any normal diet rich in cruciferous vegetables should be safe and useful, they sai...

However researchers aren’t exactly sure how the native population did it. By dinking around with various dating systems, fossils & stalagmites in Naracoorte Caves , South Aus, have demonstrated a massively decreased population immediately after Aboriginal settler arrived. What they’re completely unsure about is how these spear-armed settlers dealt with wombats the size of rhinocerouses — & ten-foot kangaroos — near the caves . One theory is that burning removed a good deal of the foliage that these animals depended on, but as usual with Australian wildlife, they’re just plain uncertain. (-:

This isn't quite what you might suspect; it’ll likely put you back into Christmas food mode again. (-: This despite relatively lowish sugar levels :-) Ingredients 1 Block of Silken Tofu (drained) 1 Graham Cracker Pie Crust (follow the directions on the box if there is one) 1 cup chocolate soymilk ¹/3 cup cocoa powder ½ cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract * optional * ¼ cup chocolate chips * optional * garnish with strawberries Directions Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 deg C). Cut the block of tofu into small chunks & put into the blender. Add the soymilk, sugar, vanilla extract, & cocoa powder & blend well until there are no large chunks of tofu left. If you’d like, add chocolate chips. Once all are combined pour into the pie crust & bake for 35-60 mins (depending on your oven) or until the top appears solid. Chill for 1-2 hrs before serving. Garnish with strawberries.

I’d reply directly, but SadLittleWebJournal reckons that everything I type is spam at the moment, so here goes broadcast. . . It’s an interesting viewpoint, one even us Aussies rarely get. For many Yankees, the rest of the world basically doesn’t exist, leading to some interesting views. The celebrations themselves seem to suck in general, except that one phase (wild partying) seems to suit many folks, so I suspect you”d get more mileage out of establishing some new workable traditions rather than trying to research and clone existing ones. You could make some of them cute-and-fun, and others pragmatically successful. You’re a lad with imagination, so cut it loose (er... but save those elves for one special occasion when the lady of your life is feeling especially generous towards you :-) (oh, and keep the light-sabre around for another special occasion, they make people nervous :-). As for actual rituals, most of the truly entertaining ones ...

An odd comment by Hinke Osinga’s partner, mathematician Bernd Krauskopf, led her to think about her crotcheting, and realise that she “could crochet the Lorenz manifold,” which led her & others towards representing mathematical figures with stitching work of various kinds. “Knitting and crocheting are helping us think about math we already know in a different light,” [said] Carolyn Yackel, a mathematician at Mercer University As Daina Taimina geared up to teach an undergraduate-geometry class as a visiting mathematician at Cornell University, she realised that she had no model for a hyperbolic surface, just for flat & 3D — so she crocheted one. By adding a new stitch every few rows, she was able to produce a hyperbolic plane. David Henderson helped her to prove that the woollen model was indeed hyperbolic. Knitting a mathematical shape may strike you as odd, but David Hilbert proved that it’s literally impossible to build a smooth model ...

The answer seems to be have a happy marriage , at least for femmes. Married ladies were stressed out & maybe given a hand to hold; their husband’s, a stranger’s or no hand. Their stress-management worked much better with their husband’s hand than with a random hand, which in turn was a little better than no hand. Interestingly enough, the response was much more than purely mechanical, as ladies who rated their marriages highly got a better reaction from their husband’s hand. The biggest decrease in stressors was amongst pain-management cells. This implies that the attitude “my husband is a pain” might have more of an impact than was previously assumed. (-:

Stuff like this gets me dreaming about a laptop which looks like an iPod and a pair of glasses. Northwestern University researchers report that by combining organic and inorganic materials they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics. [. . .] To create their thin-film transistors, Marks’ group combined films of the inorganic semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties. The indium oxide films can be fabricated at room temperature, allowing the transistors to be produced at a low cost. And, in addition to being transparent, the transistors outperform the silicon transistors currently used in LCD screens and perform nearly as well as high-end polysilicon transistors. Prototype displays using the transistors developed at Northwestern could be available in 12 to 18 months, said Marks. Rather than windscreens, I ...

Here’s one from left field: Children with higher IQs apparently tend to grow up as vegetarians . Vegetarians were more likely to be female, of higher social class and better educated, but IQ was still a significant predictor of being vegetarian after adjustment for these factors, [senior research fellow Catharine] Gale [from MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre of the University of Southampton] said. There were some other interesting comments included: “We know from other studies that brighter children tend to behave in a healthier fashion as adults — they’re less likely to smoke, less likely to be overweight, less likely to have high blood pressure and more likely to take strenuous exercise,” Gale said. “This study provides further evidence that people with a higher IQ tend to have a healthier lifestyle.” The data came from 8200 people aged 30, who had been IQ-tested at age 10. Another interesting elitist snippet: ”Evidence is also strong and...

Abobora Refogada (Brazilian Stewed Pumpkin) half kg pumpkin; seeded, peeled and cut into 2cm cubes 2 tablespoons cooking oil 1 clove garlic, minced 2 scallions (spring onions will do), minced salt and pepper to taste Place the pumpkin, butter, garlic & scallions in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the butter melts. Cover, reduce the heat and cook until the pumpkin is fork tender. Stir the mixture occasionally so that it does not stick. Season and cook for 3 more minutes. Serve warm. Simple. Tasty. (-:

Pineapple-Coconut Pie Yeah, well, so it has American-style ingredients... it still tastes excellent! 1-1/3 cups unsweetened pineapple juice 2/3 cup unsweetened orange juice 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup cornstarch 2 cups crushed pineapple 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup shredded coconut Briefly blend all but pineapple & coconut. Pour into a saucepan and cook on medium-high until clear, stirring constantly. Remove from heat & stir in coconut & pineapple. Fill a baked 9-inch pie shell. Sprinkle toasted coconut or chopped nuts on top & chill for several hours before eating. Toast the coconut by putting about 1/4 cup in a skillet & heat on medium. It will burn quickly so keep stirring until it is a light brown.

And now for something completely different: a recipe. 1 can chunk pineapple, drained 1 onion 1 large capsicum (sauté slightly) 1 cup tomato sauce 1/4 cup lemon juice 1/4 cup honey 1 tablespoon cornstarch (added to drained pineapple juice) 1-2 cups firm tofu cut into chunks 2 tablespoons soy sauce sprinkled over the tofu chunks Stir tofu & soy sauce very carefully, then bake in a 350 deg F (175 deg C) oven for 15 minutes. This will firm it up even more & help the flavor to bake in. Bring to a boil all but the cornstarch mixture & tofu. Stir in cornstarch & heat until thickened. Add the tofu to the rest just before serving, stirring only gently so the tofu doesn’t break apart. Serve over (brown) rice. Tasty!

Turiasaurus riodevensis is a European sauropod weighing up to 48t apiece, say investigators (the Spanish inquisitors?) who recently discovered one. Our little pet was 31m long. So evidently the EU was a larger dinosaur than anyone thought. (-:

The intent-to-reproduce changes the way we learn while watching , which could be an interesting explanation of how FOSS culture works. The study monitored people’s brains while they lay absolutely still, watching others dealing with a physical problem. The people who watched intending to do the same thing themselves showed up internal actions in MRI scans which those watching without intent lacked. The MRI images turned out to be excellent predictors of how well the observers would actually do at reproducing the actions they watched. One has to wonder how much inadvertant training happens while one watches TV? Or when one is watching misbehaviour or crimes happen in real life? When one is watching news footage? Or video games? Anyway, there’s a simple lesson there: watch with intent if you want to maximise your learning capacity. LCA presenters , this may be why your audience is giving you funny expressions as you present. You may be more successful than you, um, intend. (-:...

Here is an excellent article entitled “What Businesses Can Learn from Open Source” and linked from a Kathy Sierra post. It was given as a talk as Oscon 2005 (you’ll recognise a few faces there): Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it’s “work safe.” The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it’s ever going to be. It has a fair bit to say about professionalism, not much of it very relaxing. (-: for example :-) That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I’m convinced, is a mistake. It’s up to the eyeballs in treasurable quotes like this one: Many em...

What every backpack needs, it seems, is bungees . Carefully springing a backpack reduces the vertical travel (as percieved by your body) to about one-fifth the directly-connected values. Puts a spring into your step, that does. For example, a person able to carry 48 pounds in a static backpack can carry 60 pounds in a bungee backpack, and can also run more comfortably. Lightning Packs LLC is now working on reducing the total weight of the backpack, & developing a light-weight “daypack” version.

Physicists looking at large galaxy structure are becoming unsatisfied with Dark Matter/Dark Energy explanations, so they’ve had a bit of a think about how gravity works. Jacob Bekenstein’s relativistic covariant theory of gravity (TeVeS for TEnsor VEctor Scalar with a Hebrew flavour) looks like a good fit, because it seems to explain the same things as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) but without tripping over factors like gravitational lensing. It also allows for fast growth of density variation from small disturbances during recombination, & has many other useful properties. So. . . we might have a new theory of gravity (different at large scales) to deal with, shortly. The only constant thing is change?

Well, it’s official now: exercise is good for your brains, even when you’re young . I’m looking around at people like Stewart Smith or Pia Waugh — with their sharp-toys obsessions — or our resident cyclomaniac from Canberra (hi, Mr Hanley), or our other assortment of hyperactives (e.g. Jeff, Rusty, Conrad, LuChilli, Sandra, The Head Gnome, etc. . . too many to really say hi to :-) & thinking to myself. . . “goodness me, that makes us a bright bunch — collectively.” I wonder if it’s true that Oz scores more champion FOSS people because we’re all getting too much exercise, stoning the crows, dodging drop-bears & stuff? (-:

Quote of the day from Kathy Sierra courtesy of Donna Benjamin getting Planetted : Memo to Microsoft: you’ve got people doing some amazing things over there. If you could just get the hell out of the way , the world might change for the better. (-: As Kathy says, this is far from just Microsoft’s problem; I find myself thinking along these lines fairly often, including about my own work. The Kathy post which Donna referred to was extremely well done, itself. It taught about teaching by demonstrating “in flight” many of the principles to which it was directed. It’s amaxing how much intellectual weight can be added to a block of text by a little diagram with wavy lines and a label or two. And I have to admit, my own code feels so much more satisfying when it can be described as “beautiful” even though I myself definitely am not so describable. (-:

Unlike its reason for failing to talk to MS’ own Zune players, this seems to be down to Microsoft’s weirdest, newest version of NTLMv2 authentication protocol, which can be worked past by instructing Vista to use NTLM or LM when it’s available. Otherwise, you can update all of your appliances and Linux boxes to SaMBa 3.0.23d or later, which does enough gymnastics to cope with the odder, newer NTLMv2 protocol. Then wait for MS to break it again. . .

As well as being a new commercial launch site in the US , it turns out that MARS/Wallops’ initial launch featured a Linux-based tactical satellite, “The [. . .] independent embedded consulting firm developed, ported, and integrated the Linux kernel, device drivers, and other related system software, so that NRL engineers could ‘concentrate on the RF mission,’ ” so in this sense at least, Linux really was faster. (-: It turns out that as well as TacSat-2, fired off last weekend , the previous incarnation, TacSat-1 — to be launched next year — was also Linux-based; “With less than a year to design and build a satellite, this team used existing sensor hardware, industry-standard parts, shell scripts and our favorite OS to make the project come together.” TacSat-2 is one of a set of five USAF satellites designed to fly from the new launchpad, which now admits to an official name: Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MA...

Apparently, merely being the ISP selling services to someone who hyperlinks to “illegal” music files is enough to get you sued these days. No, not in the USA, here in Australia. Provision of the link is failing to prevent “infringing downloading” and so you are treated as if you provided the file (which is not on your site, only linked from it) and sued. Mailing list managers and bloggers could be in trouble as a result: “We don’t make any distinctions between big websites or small websites” said the lady running Music Industry Piracy Investigations.

It seems that a positive attitude avoids illness , shown in an experiment by CMU (Pittsburg) psychologists: his group exposed 334 healthy adults to one of two rhinoviruses via nasal drops. Those who displayed generally positive outlooks, including feelings of liveliness, cheerfulness, and being at ease, were least likely to develop cold symptoms. All subjects started the experiment in basically good health, so the results weren’t being set up by choosing unhealthy, unhappy subjects. It seems that Bobby McFerrin was right when he sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”: In every life we have some trouble But when you worry you make it Double ...or, conversely — when you happy, its power you nubble? (-:

Smoking, it seems, opens your baby to a risk of cot-death (SIDS). It turns out that the baby’s sensors for breath-pauses share an area of the brain in which nicotine lodges, either during pregnancy or directly after birth. The nicotine numbs the sensors, which then fail in detecting stopped breath, and the baby asphyxiates (dies from lack of breathed oxygen). One has to wonder how many dense children exist because their sensors kicked in, but just a little late. Why would anyone bother smoking? A few other tips: sleep them on their back line up their feet with the bottom of the bed layer sheets & thin blankets (don’t bulk them up) cover baby to the shoulders only tuck sheets and blankets in so they don’t ride up baby should be warm, but not hot & sweaty don’t use a pillow, just a firm mattress share a room (for air & temp), but not a sleeping surface The idea is to protect your baby, not smother them. Snooth, flat surfaces with no obstructions will d...

Our Community Newspaper features a DCD ad on page 15, “You’re not alone”, which mentions that “Christmas can be an especially stressful time for families and women can face more violent situations” then goes on to advertise the Women’s Domestic Violence Helpline. Fine comment on an allegedly festive season, I thought. It contrasted starkly with the “Christmas tastes made easy!” page from the Centro Warwick shopping centre and the “Wishes come true” offer of scratchy tickets from Kingsway City. Well . . . I guess it would be party time for shops, about now, anyway. There was also an ad (p25) from Enough is Enough about the damage done by people who’ve had too much to drink. Perhaps coincidentally, the paper was packed with car ads. Just for a laugh, I read my horoscope inside the back page, which amounted to “you lack motivation” [why else would I read this crud, anyway?] & “find time for...

I keep forgetting what a PITA Windows can be. I had files to transfer from a Win98 box to a WinXP box. Would the two talk over the network? Hah! Not even at gunpoint. So... I pulled down WinSCP & opened a new website on a Linux box downstairs, pushing the files up to the website — including WinSCP — via SCP , then fetching them out with a web browser to unpack & install them. Naturally, the installers wanted to put everything in C: drive — which was full. Even when I told the installers to put stuff on D: some of them disobeyed, and some put most stuff on D: but wanted to drape a drappie of stuff on C: still. What I wound up having to do was to de-install some stuff to make enough room to convince the installers to write (mostly) to D: drive, then re-install what I’d de-installed. Then I had to spend some time convincing applications that they really were where they’d found themselves when they ran. Self-evident? Nah! Too hard, it seems. Then the i...

All I can recommend for John is plenty of fresh water (a little more often than you think you need it), don’t eat anything fatty or sugary (which comes sadly close to “don’t eat” these days), plenty of relaxation. By “relaxation” I mean put yourself in a state of mind where you’re not stressing about anything — exactly the recipe you don’t want to face with a massive headache, but it does work. Other than that, one thing which seems to help most people to relax is to understand that they’ve done relatively well recently, & that they’re gently & widely respected. Again, not something you want to face with so many whingers about — but at least Jon has a head-start in that area. Oh, yes . . . don’t smack your head into anything. The consequences can be kind of lasting & maybe even terminal — & won’t help your headache no matter how tempting it may seem. (-: I spea...

Welcome to the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority , lately known as the NASA Wallops Flight Facility. They sent a 70-foot Minotaur off yesterday, including a TacSat-2 for the USAF and GeneSat-1 for NASA. They were evidently a bit rushed to assemble it all: Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles built the rocket with two stages made from decommissioned Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles and two stages from Pegasus rockets. You’d almost expect the footage to show a bloke leaning on his big electric plunger, no? (-:

These Canadian scientists have discovered that they can hold off Diabetes-1 in mice for four months using a single injection, and have good expectations for the same mechanism being effective for humans. Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas. [ . . . ] Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses — the body’s immune system turning on itself. They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that nerves likely play a role in other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease. This spells a medical revolution, not the least of which is a new, serious approach to athsma and diabetes. It turn...

Biomimetics having fun, as an Innespace Dolphin demonstrates. The engine’s air intake is atop the fin & the boat needs to be moving to go completely under, which it will do. There is also a two-seater, named Sea Breacher. The boats are made from fibreglass & kevlar; the cockpit canopies are from jet fighters (F16 & F22).

MS-Word is not doing so well with unpatched vulnerabilities recently. Here’s the third in the series. Yet another reason to try out OpenOffice Writer , me-thinks. Nothing quite as embarrassing as clicking grandly on a document & having it trash our system, eh? “Avoid shame, seek glory; use OpenOffice instead” (-:

...and to fix a dying power socket, TwinHead replaced the mainboard. They explained that they had no spare power sockets, but did have spare mainboards... It also had the RAM replaced. Not sure why, maybe the new mainboard featured a different RAM standard. Either way, it runs well again, hoorah! Now unlike the 15” CRT I was using, I’ll be able to read what I’m typing. It may not help, but I’ll be able to see what I’m doing wrong now. (-: Speaking of CRTs, have you tried to buy a new one recently? It’s getting very difficult. Since a 19” flatscreen is about AUD$280 (+GST) and a 17” is a mere AUD$215 (“with speakers”), the idea of shelling out $3 or $400 for a limited-lifespan CRT does seem a little absurd. OTOH, they do typically (as I’ve said elsewhere) come with high resolution & greater colour depth.

I’m remote-adminning a mchine which has lived in a dusty environment all of its life. The problem which raises its face is that when I want to update the machine to a current distribution of Linux (it’s given up on updates, specifically including the virus-&-spam-scanner-manager for email), the process of calculating the differences is so compute-intensive that the (dusty, so not well-ventialated) machine enters “throttled clock mode” & if I don’t suspend it after a minote or two, for a good handful of minutes at a time, the machine overheats & shuts itself down. This is a simple machine, with only a power & network cable, & two hard drives. The one next to it — a workstation — has three hard drives & a DVD burner, and has a pile of chargers and adaptors (and a wifi ADSL router) clipped to the lid, plus an external (USB2) hard drive. I’ve vacuumed out the workstation, & should have done the server as well. I fee...

Since it’s sitting right next to “my” machine, I’ve noticed that not all of the ’Doze machine’s applications respect the volume control. Most of the programs emphasise everything with a sound. This is particularly annoying with the Jungle theme up, as a thousand squeaks, moans & wails make themselves kind of diffcult to ignore.

Small (5) Madam’s contribution to the morning was to slide the curtains aside, turn her breakfast chair to face out of the window & announce that she was watching “Bird Television”. We’ve not been watching the idiot box recently. Breaths were held while madam thought her way through this. She promptly spotted & commented on some magpies. The lady (Bev) who comes in to do “care work” (it varies) for us until my head heals up had just about dropped the iron when she heard the original announcement. (-: We were a bit boggled that the 3D, colour, flickerless display was occupying her interest (Small Sir’s, too) more thoroughly than the flashy, artificial one we traditionally watch for entertainment. It was pleasing to see the more natural approach working so well.

The “ Cold Faithful” geysers on Enceladus may be really cold — as in, much colder than ice — if they’re erupting clathrates (an ice phase) which can dissolve much of the nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide etc which accompanies the observed water. The solubles presented a problem for existing theories, as liquid water doesn’t dissolve very much of the other gases. If the eruptions use clathrate, that both carries the other gases & coats the surface cracks on Enceladus with ice and/or water. This also leaves room for Enceladus’ crust to be geologically active, constantly growing & demolishing surface cracks. It’s another reminder that things are different out there, & that those comfortable old lab thought-experiments may not rove far enough to be useful.

Admittedly, the guy was discussing sex acts on chat at work , but has Internet use interfered with your work? It’d be kind of like watching TV at work, only with a keyboard. I suspect that for many of us who use the Internet for actual work, the division point(s) wouldn’t be too clear.

Linus has accepted a patch which allows 64-bit CPUs to virtualise processes. It can also, apparently, be built as a kernel module. The virtual machines are simple user-space processes, and (as with Xen) the peripheral interfacing is handled by a modified QEMU driver , making virtualisation relatively simple & easy. This is going to make testing things much simpler, from my article-author’s perspective. Rather than have a handful of machines around to test each implementation on, I can run them all from one.

Anyone who takes our own Creative Commons for granted needs to wave a few eyeballs at this article on the worlds’ creative commons & their management. What we have is very rare & valuable compared with (wild) Real Life, so it’s something we need to treasure & preserve. Not, as Real Life is doing it, with buckets of rules & horrifying penalties but with care & forethought.

I’m writing and article of software development, and I’ve built a little program in Ruby talking through FxRuby so it would be portable (that is, I can write it under Linux, then run a copy under ’Doze, Mac OS/X, etc). So... I’m dragging down these pieces for the kinderz’ toy to run, since my laptop is still in the fender-benders’ shop, and this Pentium 300 is pulling data at 5 to 6 kilobytes a second over a 512kb link. I have a P-166 running Linux which — like the other machines — keeps the accelerometer pinned on 51 or 52kB/s. I have to say that it’s not the wire, as I can start a second download in parallel, & watch it run at the same speed, & start a separate download on this Athlon 1800 and watch it run at the redline. Just for annoyance value, the one remaining download on the ’Doze box is up to 14kB for a few minutes, & I know it can do better because GTK+ downloaded at 38kB/s. The installation makes me app...

I've been loaned a Win32 machine to play some games CDs for the littlies, & (surprise) immediately ran into problems with it. Every single game wants to run with its CD in place, so you can imagine how long mis-handled CDs are going to last. Half of the games want to register themselves on-line, & one of them insists on running in 640*480*256 (ie, 8 bits deep). Which the ’Doze driver won’t do. I’d forgotten what it was like to run with this kind of junk programming. I tried running an “MS-DOS program” CD in the adjacent Linux box under DosBox, with the result that: it runs without the CD it runs in sane video modes there’s no DOS box to close afterwards I don’t have to pull the lid off & fiddle with the power button to get it started I can run them from any screen in the house * I’ll run the other games under WINE to see how far I get. It’s a big time-saver already, & we haven’t even started to visibly wear ou...

Theories abound to do with reasons why, but a study of men with osteoarthritis showed them at knee pain levels of 60% after smoking versus 45% without. One theory is that people are more of a pain when they smoke — as in, their pain threshold is lower. Most of the others relate to increased stress & poison levels in the smokers. Whatever the cause and connection, the scientists are excited because smoking is, as they term it, a “modifiable risk factor.” Stop smoking, and perhaps the joints will benefit. They also found that cutting back & using nicotine replacements enabled many of their subjects to kick the habit. This contrasts with US findings, which say that quitting has to be done abruptly .

Well... have you had your sea-snail toxins ? University of Queensland researchers have noticed that many animals see side-effect-free pain relief from conotoxins released as part of potentially deadly sea-snail venom, & are working to make this available to humans. Leeches have been used for centuries, so it’s interesting to see other beasties being investigated. Mind you, sea snails wouldn’t have been my first choice. (-: Sorry, the weirdness wasn’t quite finished for the day. (-:

A couple of odd thoughts: if you were going to live for thousands of years , how would your life change (yes, I mean other then being longer)? A film with many gold stars in the ratings explores the issue. By the way, has anyone seen the much-billboarded “ Happy Feet ” yet? That was also highly rated in the US, and I’m wondering if it’s worth seeing. In a different philosophical bent, we have a book about scientists’ struggle to identify a source for altruism in a world dominated by survival of the fittest. I would never be certain that my explanation wasn’t completely invented. (-: OK, that’s probably it for random posts for a while.

SWMBO’s machine surprised me this morning by blowing up its power supply. Handily, I had a suitable replacement tucked away in a cupboard, but it’s a clear reminder that dramatic failures like gronked hard disks won’t provide all of the excitement. I also stumbled across a reassuring New Scientist article this morning, which claims that “crazies” are necessary to science, & many advances came about only because they had a relatively free hand (e.g. Copernicus). I’m glad that at least some scientists can see outside the bounds of convention. (-:

Interesting article on choosing burnable media carefully. Interesting reader comments, too. Aimed by Patrick McFarland at developers, photographers, & others prone to archiving data for long periods of time.

75 computers, that is. NSW is pushing out a mixed ISDN/satellite network based on Debian — oddly enough, Rural Link happens at the request of the State Library (solo ISDN was too expensive). Telstra sources the satellite dish and the Linux-based Ursys BusiBox satellite router interfaces with ISDN. An odd mix. It’s nice to see Telstra genuinely working with FOSS, because “We also tried to develop an interface with Windows but got too frustrated as [we found it] too unstable.” I guess a BSOD became “a blue scream of death” out in the middle of nowhere... nice to know that your local library can do an “apt-get install package ” though. (-:

My neurosurgeon removed the staples on schedule, & it hurt a lot less than I expected. The only actual pain came when some sticky stuff in my hair (disinfectant, I presume, since no glue was used) grabbed a departing staple & pulled as it left — & even that was fairly minor, barely any flinching. It’s proabbly only psychedelic , but I feel much lighter-headed now. Unexpectedly, the whole process has left me very tired (I wonder what the staples acted as an antenna for? :-), so I’m guessing that it’ll be lights-out early tonight.

OPEN SOURCE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Thank you for your email, dated 24 October 2006, regarding the above issue. Presently, the Department of Industry and Resources (DoIR) is finalising negotiations with a provider to initiate the second phase of promotion of open source. It is planned that the provider will make available a meeting place for users, house the Open Source Server and establish facilities for developers. It is also planned to hold discussions with interested parties early in 2007 to map out a strategy to cover 2007/08 through to 2009/10. The letter also included contact details so I could be included in these discussions if I liked.

Oddly enough it can make a big difference to the antioxidant content of the final tea. Roasting & drying the leaves with FIR (Far InfraRed) heat instead of conventional heat can boost the antioxidants, & can also curtail Vitamin C & caffiene levels. Seung-Cheol Lee & his associates at Kyungnam University [ South Korea ] have been whittling away at the problem, making sure that they know exactly what effects the FIR has, & hopefully gaining a clear understanding of why the difference in heating methods has a significant effect. Their current theory is that polyphenol concentrations are elevated by the process. The idea is to make a hot cup of tea ever more nutritious & flavoursome. The results should be available worldwide, so even backwoods delis scattered across the UK can provide better tea for the traditional British grandmothers. “We may not get your broadband right, but the tea while you’re waiting is wonderful.” (-:

Scientsts investigating breast milk have found a number of startling features of the breasts’ output. For example, They applied breast milk to the cancerous lung cells, and all the cells died. Breast milk killed cancer cells. “From that moment on, we’ve been working with it,” Svanborg says. Breast milk’s third-largest ingredient is “is a mixture of indigestible sugars known as oligosaccharides. Many of these sugars occur only in human milk” and the scientists wondered why breasts “wasted” effort producing these. It turned out that the oligosaccharides protect against diseases like diarhhoea caused by campylobacter. The list goes on. “Unlike the antibodies that mothers pass along to their infants through breast milk, oligosaccharides can protect the baby from pathogens to which the mother has never been exposed.” They do this, in part by offering binding sites to hostile bacteria which mimic real gut-lining sites, then ca...

The lakes are going away big time and it’s mostly due to hot, dry weather at their source inflows rather than over-use. I was impressed by this quote: A further dramatic drop in Victoria’s water levels might even turn off this spigot for the Nile, a lifeline for more than 100 million Egyptians, Sudanese and others. That’s half a dozen Australias or sixty Western Australias being fed from one river! In Perth, you’d have panicky politicians setting up massive stills in a hurry, but that wouldn’t be helping people from Geraldton or Mount Newman or Esperance very much. Also, most of our population is in or near Perth, over good-quality sealed roads. Africa’s people are spread out hither & yon over roads of random quality with limited and “interesting” mechanical service en route. Africa has 4 million square kilometers of deserts (ie, their deserts are nearly twice as big as all of Western Australia, nearly as big as all of Australia), whe...

We get a mention , too: Europe — at 23.2 per cent — is just behind Australasia (23.4%) in its use of the foxy browser. One in four browsers is Firefox. Toss in a few Operas, Seamonkeys & things — maybe we can write off MSIE soon? (-:

The idea of a CPU running from a AAA battery is still a few years away, but Dae-Hyun Kim, a post-doctoral associate of MIT professor Jesus del Alamo, intends to present working components at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting next week. They’re frailer than silicon, but InGaAs technology works, & a couple of years’ research should overcome any deficiencies. Professor del Alamo expects real devices to hit the streets within 10 years, pretty much just in time for silicon to stonewall in performance & extensbility terms. The transistors are prepared in the US, but the “high quality of the semiconductor material”, itself prepared in Singapore, contributed to the transistors’ performance. Existing devices push 2.5x as much current as silicon.

I had my eyes checked out yesterday, and it turns out that the focussing issues I’m facing are both fairly “normal” for head injuries & also not permanent , which is excellent. By a coincidence (it hasn’t anything to do with my appointment) Stephen Leslie, the optometrist, has a lot of cycling patients, mostly the unimpacted kind. I get to wear a pair of glasses to help the focus, while my brain comes back up to speed on using both the focus & my eyes as a pair (focussing & aiming them together, for example). I’m really being looked after about the eye damage, because I took a major impact on my left eyebrow, which usually results in some form of eye injury, but hasn’t this time, apparently. I got to count the staples during my last dressing change, and there are 45 of them. Thankfully, unless something’s pushing against one, I can’t feel them. I’m glad to be so conveniently built, since I now have some idea of what it wo...

Physicists have discovered nothing ! Well... something very close to nothing, anyway. Piyare Jain shows detection of a particle called an axion, which is expected to have many very heavy friends like Higgs-Boson. The axion has no charge, light mass & a short lifetime. Jain found the first signs of it in 1974 but has had to wait for “a heavy ion beam at very high energy” to be available for further testing. Jain learned to use a special photo-detector from its inventor, British physicist Cecil Powell, in order to usefully detect the 10-13 second lifespan of these ephemeral particles where CERES at CERN (and others) had failed. Axions decay into electron-positron pairs. Jain rates his University at Buffalo discovery as “mission is complete” status.

Alongside a story titled “ Microsoft warns of new Word vulnerability ” sits a new announcement that “iiNet is going to migrate early” to... Vista & MS-Office 2007. Uh... this is a technical firm? I guess iiNet haven’t changed that much in recent years, then. A friend of mine, some years ago, rang up their tech support because their (iiNet’s) main DNS was dead, and was told to hang up and dial back. He patiently explained the problem & all of his testing, but they insisted. It was more than 2 hours before his modem was answered again. Contrast this with the early organisation who proxied their entire traffic through a very busy (something like 6 SCSI hard drives) Linux-based Pentium 200 for several years, not replacing it simply because the blasted thing wouldn’t die. I watched one of their techs spending time with a PuTTY session running full-screen on his apparently-mandatory ’Doze workstation, setting up websites (I vaguely re...

Department of Education and Training in NSW “may increase the penetration of Linux on its 165,000 desktop fleet because open source is ‘clearly an industry trend’.” Other favourite quote: a lot of innovative educational solutions are coming out of the open source area That’s from Tim Anderson, Information Services Director. So... how many of them are coming to LCA2007?

Our tiny, innocuous little geckos can walk upside down on glass at 50 steps a second , or the same speed as the hum we (Australians) get out of mains applicances like flourescent lights or solenoids. Apparently, US & Chinese scientists have been watching the little suckers run about. The little lizards switch on & off the stickiness by rolling their toes, first to expose as much van der Waals (inter-atomic stickiness) forces as possible, then to separate their spatulae one at a time for the next step.

Several times the size of the whole planet , to be more precise. These plasma whirlpools feed Earth’s magnetic field with fresh (cooler & denser) plasma from the solar wind. Think of it as being like Earth’s power plug curled up in space. Until recently, scientists weren’t able to observe the whirlpools’ involvement, but Katariina Nykyri and her team were able to piece observations from ESA’s Cluster quartet of satellites together to demonstrate the effect. It’s one of the protective features of the Earth which has no doubt helped us to survive the radioactive disinhibitions of stars, including our “own” Sun. For an idea of scale, the whirlpools are several tens of thousands of kilometers across, so you wouldn’t exactly be facing bright flares in space, or anything like that if you went out to look at them.

MS-Word is suffering “zero day” attacks right now. I’m happy to have installed an answer a few days ago — but not from MS. An African student boarding with a relative needed a word-processor, but the computer he was allowed to use had a spreadsheet, presentation program & Works. No real word processor. So I pulled down & installed the answer . Not without difficulty, since this was an XP machine. I needed an Administrator password & didn’t have one, so I pressed F8 on boot & added an Admin user to do the install. I don’t know how happy this will make the OpenOffice people, but this bloke, after using Writer for ten minutes, asked me how I’d been able to install Word so quickly. He’s not dumb (quite a bright bloke, actually), but he’d never noticed an alternative. He was very happy when it read in a broken .DOC file, too & that it could produce PDFs without any extra software. Apparently, some fellow students had ...

Japan has an interesting habit of forgetting to stay a minor power, then going out & doing something major in their own interesting way. The last one I remember of these was measuring an asteroid — Itokawa — with a satellite named Hayabusa in a mission known as MUSES-C & finding it only a quarter as dense as beach sand. Any samples will be returned to Woomera, it being a safer & more obvious target than even Hokkaido. This time, they’re sending a satellite constellation known as SELENE to orbit the Moon. It’s a constellation rather than a single satellite so that the two smaller orbiters (“VRAD” & “Relay”) can relay radio from each other to do things like accurately measure Lunar gravitation on the far side. They’ve done a number of such interesting things with the mission planning. Part of the Nipponese special features include being able to include your wishes in the mission as a kind of payload. You get the r...

So claims the SMH , anyway. It may just be the reporter taking an optimistic view, but I liked this part a little: “The amended reforms make it clear consumers can transfer the music they own onto devices such as iPods and enable the next wave of technology by allowing people to record a TV or radio program on mobile devices to watch it at a more convenient time.” The amendments also removed on-the-spot fines for some copyright offences, to ensure they didn’t “unintentionally capture harmless activities of ordinary Australians”. Dale Clapperton (EFA) liked the amendments, but Nicola Roxon (Shadow Attorney-General) is still iffy about even the amended bill. Well, it’s an improvement, at least. Back to watching what happens, I guess.

Here is a wider discussion in Nature of the Antikythera Mechanism I mentioned a few days ago. This litle discussion starts to bring home a sense of the intricate sophistication of this two-thousand-year-old mechanism & makes an interesting read, as well as investigating some of the cultural mechanisms behind it (why, for example, is it one of a kind?) & the ship it went down in. It has some excellent pictures of the mechanism & reconstructions.

Tensilica are shipping the Extensa 7 at 250MHz & 0.082mW (yes, that’s MILLIwatts, overclockers) per clock cycle. To polish the Penguinista perspective, they are available with MontaVista Linux. They’re billed as “post-RISC” style processors, so they can do sneaky/fast VLIW instructions, & “even extend the architecture with C/C++ application-specific instructions” for those of us who absolutely have to eke out the last skerrik of performance from every device which falls into our hands. According to Tensilica, the Extensa 7 churns through twice as much code as an ARM7TDMI-S while drawing roughly half of the power. The LX2 variant of Extensa also does faster I/O, is better optimised for VLIW-style instructions, & stars a high-speed 7-stage instruction pipeline. All chips include various error-correcting & power-saving sneakiness.

Coriolus versicolor , a Chinese mushroom, boosts the human immune system to help prevent cancer. Now here’s an interesting quote: “It entered the medication area in Asia and we didn’t know about it, maybe because there were no patents on it,” said Prof Borody [director of Sydney’s PSK Information Foundation] Imagine that, a lack of innovation being blamed on an innovation-killer! More detail: “When we look at the publications that have been carried out by independent investigators, it really makes a major difference in survival,” he said. “This polysaccharide has very, very, few side effects and yet when taken long term, it seems to work as an anti-tumour agent via immunological stimulation.” Oh, yes... & Australia seems to have hammered England in the cricket... & Fiji seems to be having a revolution. Hey, it’s the world, stuff’s happening, follow the links if you’re curious. (-:

So says the Department of Health in the UK. Being obese ups the cancer-rate in non -smokers by a third. Over-weight sufferers don’t heal as well, either. I can’t see any good reason for the rates in smokers to be dissimilar. 90% of all cancer cases in the UK are caused by smoking. If this disturbs you, what should you do? Drink much more fresh water Eat as close to raw as you can (more popular with veggo’s) Leave as much time between meals as reasonable (5 hours recommended) Don’t break yourself, but structure your day for more exercise Spend a little more time in nature & the wild Sleep regularly & well Avoid sweeteners, both “real” & artificial Figure out how to avoid smoking or cigarettes Be happy, avoid stress I’m not sure how to reconcile that last guideline with all of the others. But it helps. (-:

Lockheed Martin are given the go to build Orion & fly one by 2014. Orion , it appears, will be used to build a Moon-base on one of the Lunar poles. The agency’s deputy head, Shana Dale, is quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying that the “fundamental lunar approach” will be very different to earlier Moon missions. Amongst other things, there will be conceptually full-time manning instead of transient missions, & the base will be used “as a stepping stone” for Mars missions. Meanwhile, it seems that Europe are also investigating Lunar missions with a similar launch date. Amongst other ideas, they want to grow a Dutch tulip there. Unfortunately, these are modern Orions, not the traditional bang-bangs of Stanislaw Ulam, who visualised a bazooka version of a Jules Verne gun for Orion. The original Orion project was sponsored by the USAF & didn’t survive the transfer of most missions to NASA. It’s a pity, because Orion w...

Forgot to mention that Mr Surgeon prodded my head & found it all good — but the hospital hadn’t given me any dressing material (or instructions), so he directed me to get some from a pharmacy. Even the fancy sticky-tape to attach the dressings with was five bucks a metre, & the pads even more so. For tiny things like that, it makes me glad that ICWA is picking up the big bills. For the morbidly curious, the dressing doesn’t stick to the staples, it sticks to the hair & skin instead. I’m supposed to keep the wound dry, which makes showers a bit of a performance. Having my head (approximately) the right shape does make sleeping easier, because I don’t have to “balance” my head across the pillow to lie still. People also look at me slightly less weirdly wearing medical dressings than they do someone wearing a helmet, even though the dressings are oddly-shaped contrasting bright white where the helmet is dark & can be matched agains...

OpenDocument has been published as ISO standard “ISO 26300.2006”, which implies the ability to make royalty-free implementations at will. It also means that ODF can be pitched as an actual standard instead of a potential standard, & this is something that many managers (& accountants) understand better than “Open”. There is also a standard test-suite of ODF documents available. Unlike certain competitors, this isn’t going to change at the drop of a hat.

It’s about time for one of these, so I distilled the cores of a few pages on the topic. Gifts were exchanged in winter as a part of Saturnalia, the celebration of Saturn, their god of agriculture. The presents were originally “lucky” fruits called “Stenae”. The comment “All ranks devoted themselves to feasting & mirth with presents exchanged among friends” is common. Mistletoe is a druidic solstice custom, as is kissing under it (a fertility ritual). It was considered a divine plant & it symbolised love & peace. Scandinavian Yuletide gives cold climates the Yule (roughly, “return of the sun” where the sun was defined as Mithras) log. A large log was set to burning, nominally for twelve days, from which we get “the 12 days of xmas”. The 25th of December comes straight from Mithraism by agency of the Roman emperor Constantine. There is no written-out date for Jesus’ birthday, but the middle of a freezi...

2.5m-tall kangaroos & wombats the size of cars were not hunted to death says Dr Gregory Webb of Queensland University of Technology. Fossils of these animals & more (huge lizards, ostrich-sized emus, etc) show up not as suddenly hunted, but as gradually driven to extinction by a drying-out of Australia’s climate, with forests giving way to scrub over time. The article also claims: the country [Australia] struggles with what could be its worst drought in 1,000 years, affecting more than half its farmlands Sobering thoughts.

“Happy Feet”, a movie about penguins, has proven significantly more popular than the new James Bond movie Casino Royale in US cinemas. No, I don’t think it means that penguins have hit Attention Critical Mass, but they are landing in the news a fair bit in recent days. Maybe the Penguinistas are starting to rise to power? (-:

The surgeon will be de-staple-ising me, instead of our GP, and it gets done next Monday instead of on Friday. Leaving the helmet aside has been most refreshing. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the irritations one suffers with a head injury aren’t a single thing one can point at accusingly, but hordes of smaller things which collectively build up & conspire to drive the victim gradually twittery. An example was the recent no-pressurised-planes limitation. One other of those things was the helmet; it’s amazing how upsetting having that thing constantly sliding across one’s face can be. Now that item’s just down to people examining my head-dressings with a curious eye & in a week I can look forward to having “only” scars visible. And — for a while — an odd haircut. I hope. If there’s a take-home lesson from the whole shambles, it would be “be careful — & wear the safety gear”

It turns out that my cranioplasty hasn’t yet guaranteed a sealed cranium. The practical effect of this is no (pressurised) aeroplane hulls for a bit more than a month... which takes us to LCA2007 time. I might do a video presentation anyway, in the hope that it’ll be useful to someone. It would, oddly enough, fit with the theme of the intended presentation itself quite well. If you have a favourite video format (& give a hoot anyway), please reply to this with your recommendation. If you’re a West Aussie & have a suitable video camera kicking around, please also reply.

Emperor penguins can dive to 600m for 20 minutes & do many other things with implications for sciences like anaesthesia, like marching 160km through icy conditions before diving into ice-slush for 20 minutes. Without getting “the bends”, which even the great whales get. Aside from little tricks like more myoglobin, which helps muslces to store oxygen, physiologists are trying to untangle the penguin’s diving advanatges so that they can be applied to humans. Amongst other things, penguins can get by with very little oxygen, where people would black out. There are many situations where an ability to get along under pressure or with limited air can be important.

It turns out that Popeye the sailor’s famous diet prevents skin damage , reducing the chances of skin cancer by 55% if you eat at leats 3 serves of it each week. It’s a pity for their marketing plan that this wasn’t known years ago when our maritime hero first began quaffing his iron-laden nutriment. Ah, well, it leaves a potential secret weapon available for modern parents trying to winkle dark-green veggies into der kinder. Dr Jolieke van der Pols (Queensland Institute of Medical Research) recommends also using the hat, sunscreen etc, since cancer can be kind of terminal & the dietary improvement amounts to “only” about half.

SWMBO rang a pizza shop today, seeking cheap specials which they available until 2 o’clock (14:00). She rang at 7 past 1 (13:07) by a non-timezoned clock. WA time-shifted forwards an hour overnight. Oh, well. She decided that the instant 1/4 increase in price was too hard, & gave up.

An oldie but goodie comes around again: more samples from the pyramids reckon that at least the upper layers were assembled concrete-style rather than carved-limestone-style. This answer will solve a lot of time-&-energy riddles if proven good. Specifically, it’s a quick enough construction method to actually allow time to build the pyramids, & probably without even the mobs & teams of slaves depicted building them in the movies. The reason it was disqualified previously? It amounts to no mainstream archaeologist admitting that such technology existed at the time. As has constantly been the case throughout history, another surprise along those lines would be almost routine by now. (-:

Well, my head’s back together...  & they stapled it shut, this time. Our GP’s going to have fun with staple-removers next week. Yes, the removers were included as part of the deal! Surgery was remarkably quick, & I woke up later that afternoon with a complete head & minimal pain (well... truly imperceptible pain for having a chunk of metal screwed into my head, but paracetamol is still needed; applause for the absence of anything stronger). I’m amazed that I can be out of hospital two days after the surgery. Not saying everything’s perfect, but for the work that was done it’s a remarkably quick turn-around time. I’ve met lots of other patients whose lives had been much improved by a few short minutes (or in some cases hours) of cut-&-paste — it leads me to wonder how well we’d do if we truly understood surgery, rather than simply building on our current collection of functional rituals, which are already impressive. I...