Plantagenet Penguinista

I was browsing through a scientist’s life story, when I ran across this interesting statement: In addition, while there I published (or had in press) about 20 books, monographs, and book chapters (many related to religion, which inferiorated my colleagues). The guy was (at the time) a Jehovah’s Witness, so I thought “No, hang on, he means ‘infuriated’ ” — but did he? Really? Coming on at people with a superior I-know-it-all attitude will indeed make them feel inferior, so, yes, they could become “inferiorated.” I know that — no matter how careful I am — I’ll inadvertantly inferiorate people when I get “on a roll” explaining something I know a lot about, such as computers. So their negative reaction isn’t to the information they’re recieving, it’s to their feelings of inferiority, partly due to my carelessness. Looking back now, I wish I’d read this years ago. So many conversations would have gone more smoothly, & the information would actually have got across, rather than being bu...

... for intelligent file management. That’s version 1.3.0beta. I discovered that editing a 123 megabyte FLAC file creates over a gigabyte of work files. Unfortunately, /tmp on this laptop is a gigabyte. However, Audacity wins a prize by making the work directory configurable, which allowed me to put it in /var/tmp/ long enough to do the editing. I must also mention that it’s pretty good at click-free cutting & stuff like that, & that the menu entries show practice. For example, one of the Edit menu items is Trim , which lops off the data either side of the selected area. It only saves a few seconds a go for not having to do two selects & cuts, but it’s amazing how much that simple addition smooths out my work-flow. I leavce a little trailer for a noise sample, then select the sound “inside” that to de-noise, then Edit/Trim to keep just the filtered sound. It’s one of the few ops that makes me wish for a 4GHz dual-CPU laptop. (-: Thank...

Specifically, proof-reading stuff that MSIE users will see. It seems that there’s ways of breaking tables which only MSIE gets upset about. They don’t show up in Firefox, SeaMonkey, Konqueror, Opera or even Links as broken (wellll... if you look carefully you can see some minor damage in Opera) but they do in MSIE. It struck me as funny that an MS software product should be most vulnerable to damage, given how much the turn-your-back blip-past-the-problem attitude seems to rule their developers.

Lunch today was a little random. Miss 6 authored it, & it consisted of big slabs of dried paw-paw, mango, honeyed cashews and some half rice-biscuits painted with Nutella. It tasted OK, but was very heavy on the suger; I think it took a litre of water just to get it eaten. Well, we didn’t need dessert. (-:

It seems that the NSW Parks people have a volunteer of their own to take care of Sugarloaf Point lighthouse , so we miss out on that one. Some of the alternatives are kind of interesting, from one on Fraser Island in Queensland , to one on the southern-most tip of Tasmania , & even one on Booby Island (no proper page, sadly) in Torres Strait. The Maatsuyker Island one looks impessive, provided we’re able to give up our irrational addiction to warmth and dryness. (-:

I’ve been seeing email from mx#.sjc.ebay.com but my DNS hasn’t been finding them. I’m also seeing mxpool#.ebay.com as well. In order to get the actual mails, I’ve had to lie to PostFix about the existence of those addresses by sticking a list like this into a flat file and PostMapping it: /^mx2.sjc.ebay.com$/ PERMIT ...then adding that file to a... check_helo_access regexp:/etc/postfix/ filename ...statement in “/etc/postfix/main.cf”. If I wasn’t managing my own email domains, I wouldn’t have this option. I’m also not about to turn HELO domain checking off, because I’m not interested in about tripling the number of spam messages my filters see (already at about 1,000 a day).

Contradicting traditional assumptions, it seems that the big tip is lay off the meat . It seems that carnivory is very expensive as you get larger: We show that the transition from small to large prey can be predicted by the maximization of net energy gain; larger carnivores achieve a higher net gain rate by concentrating on large prey. However, because it requires more energy to pursue & subdue large prey, this leads to a 2-fold step increase in energy expenditure, as well as increased intake. Across all species, energy expenditure & intake both follow a three-fourths scaling with body mass. However, when each dietary group is considered individually they both display a shallower scaling. This suggests that carnivores at the upper limits of each group are constrained by intake & adopt energy conserving strategies to counter this. Given predictions of expenditure & estimates of intake, we predict a maximum carnivore mass of approximately a ton, consistent with the large...

If you build your stretchy nanotubes into a honeycomb-like web they can recover better from failures, say Min Wang, Xinming Qiu, & Xiong Zhang from Tsinghua University. While it looks like a fish-net, the atomic scale changes the way things work: the forces that determine the nanostructure’s properties are actually quite different from those of a macroscopic honeycomb or fishnet because of the great scale difference. For example, the scientists indicate that the van der Waals interactions & the recombination of bonds at the atomic level would affect the results when the structure is stretched. The result is that the honeycomb can load-share much better than “straight” nanotubes, leading to it facing the (inevitable) wear-&-tear better. Interesting new materials should result. Here is another molecular honeycomb forming , this time naturally.

It seems that bats know more than they should about flying , able to routinely pull stunts which take high-speed video cameras & wake analyses to untangle. The results suggest the possibility that a novel lift-generating mechanism may be at work in bats & point to the highly maneuverable mammals as a model for tiny flying machines. ...and here comes the science... “Bats have unique capabilities,” says Breuer, “but the goal is not to build something that looks like a bat. We want to understand bat flight & be able to incorporate some of the features of bat flight into an engineered vehicle.” ...with some interesting observations about evolution... “Gliding has evolved in mammals seven times. That tells us that it’s really easy for an animal with skin to evolve into a glider, but going from a square gliding wing to a long, skinny flapping wing has not happened seven times. It might have happened once. And now it doesn’t look like bats ...

Now the State of Kerala has declared support for Linux . Kerala is the most literate State in India. With this steady stream of States declaring support for Linux, it looks like years of outsourcing to India may be bearing fruit for the USA: Indians have learned to be suspicious of Windows, it seems. So... ten years down the track, will the US industrial might still keep them leading the pack, so to speak, or will technically-brighter Indian states be working in new & interesting ways to make India an industrial super-power? This can make much more sense if the world’s population is modelled as 100 people , which simplifies some of the differences. 50 of them are women. 58 would be Asians, 12 would be Africans, two-thirds of a person would be ANZ. 20 would get three quarters of the income, and 20 more would get 2% between them. A third would not have clean, safe drinking water. Half would be illiterate. 7 would own a vehicle (93 would not). Half of a person would be a soldier,...

I browsed across an old WAV file (converted to Ogg) today, & this is what came up: [tuning noises] [sung theme] “All Hit Radio” All right, you’re listening to All Hit Radio, and it’s 53 degrees [fahrenheit?] at 30 minutes past the hour. And right now, on our all-request line I have Mike Wedgewood on the line. What would you like to hear? [faintly] We are observing your Earth. He, Babe, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you too well. You’re going to have to speak a little closer into the ’phone. OK, Babe? What would you like to hear again? We are observing your Earth. Hey, Mike, I’m sorry, Babe, but that is not on our play-list! And by the way, you sound great over the ’phone. Anyway, if you give us your request, we’ll be glad to play it for you, Babe, so let’s hear it! We are observing your Earth. Uh, listen Mike, I’m sorry, Babe, but we can’t... ...and we’d like to make... ...I'm sorry, Mike, but we ca...

Someone’s figured out what to do with all of the excess methane we have: shoot it into space . XCOR Aerospace’s model 5M15 rocket motor does just that. Methane is easier to manage than kerosene, & much easier to store & manage than hydrogen. In fact, it’s so much easier that they’re looking at Mars missions which use stored hydrogen to generate methane on the spot. XCOR & Alliant Techsystems (ATK) will next build a regeneratively-cooled version of the engine this year, to make a “flight-weight” edition for real-life use. The test-firings used a heatsink core (serious overclocking) for half a dozen tests in which “everything worked incredibly well” according to XCOR’s CEO, Jeff Greason. So... we won’t be seeing “pigs in space” just yet, but pig output in space, yes, & cow output, too.

Stuck in town for lunch, so what could we do? We pulled in to this lovely little patisserie right next to the West Leederville train station [there seems to be one in Whitfords City, too], named Michel’s, & had the most delicious lunch (in my case, finished with a Mini Mud Muffin). Some of the things which these guys produce are simply amazing, like their Passionfruit Mist Gateaux, which comes across as a large but delicate, chocolate-flavoured flower — or their St Honoré, which is the most amazing collection of cream, choclate & strawberries. I had to start with something non-sweet, so I chose one of their veggie pasties, which are very flavoursome & have an excellent texture.

...of lightning ! the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball ...in a high current? Sounds like a plasma to me! (-: That would seem to be an obvious way to form glowing balls during lightning-focussed events, yes? Just that nobody in the article said so. The original ideas that these guys are following up came from the University of Canterbury (that’s just north of the LCA2006 site in Dunedin), which might cheer up some of the Kiwis at LCA2007.

Steve got a letter delivered from the UK to here in Aus with only a street name as an address. It’s not international, but back when we were living down at the farm, I’ve had mail delivered which was posted to “Brooks 6326”, the latter being the postcode for Narrikup, the more-or-less shire which delivered our mail back then. It turns out that there is one other Brooks property in their delivery area, but with nobody living on it at the time (they lived in Albany) all they were getting for the others was formally-addressed official letters, which made it easy to decide what the one word in addition to the postcode indicated. Either way, I was impressed to get mail with a one-number address correctly delivered. I did hear, years ago, of a lass getting a letter delivered to “<name>, City Beach” delivered. Some postal pixie had also scrawled “try Australia” on this one. I guess Australia counts as WTF-land for mail? Being postie for Mo...

I have a Ruby app which runs fine on the command line, but I want to embed it in a web page. This leaves me with a problem, since both of the machines available for me to do this with are running slightly older versions of Mandriva Linux (one 2005, one 2006.0) which don’t natively support mod_ruby. This laptop, on the other hand (it’s 2007.0), took about 15 seconds to find & install it. Sadly, I need to carry the laptop around, so can’t leave it hooked up as a toy web-server. One of the machines has been sitting on someone’s carpet for so long that the CPU overheats if I run an update on it, so it thermally shuts down & reboots before installing anything. The other one runs several websites on specific versions of PostgreSQL, which are of course going to be difficult about updating smoothly. And it also runs as a workstation, which means that I have to kick someone off to update it. )-: Both of them are DNS & email servers, as well as web servers, so ...

The intellectual look? With some imagination, maybe. (-: I’d never expected to need glasses, but the desynchronising which has happened between my brain & eyeballs means that these help a fair bit. They bring closer things into sharper focus, & add a sensation of depth to my field of view. The idea is to re-train my brain to drive my eyes right by habit, after which the glasses shouldn’t be as necessary.

SWMBO visited a Telstra site with a semi-broken chunk of Flash on its front page, which jams up any broswer with a Flash plugin, & in fact makes the whole screen unresponsive. Most unusual for Linux. SWMBO had just been for a morning walk. Miss 5 had a “bird television”-style explanation: You haven’t been sitting at it, & now it’s cross. Oh, if only computer problems were that simple. (-: Anyway, a few seconds with top(1) & the k (kill) command, & it seems to be right again.

This TPOD carries a memorable quote from physicist Alfvén: Although the theories were generally accepted, the plasma itself refused to believe in them. Four theories were devised for how plasma would react to a curving magnetic field (as in, what would a solar-sailer encounter?), & the plasma “chose” to follow none of them. Science versus reality, & for a change, reality won. (-:

Andromeda has an extended halo of red stars , Puragra (Raja) Guhathakurta of the University of California, Santa Cruz, announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Galaxies have a central bulge, which falls away fairly rapidly, & a ring (disc) of stars around that, & finally a “stellar halo” with a much wider distribution. Astronomers have been looking for “halo” stars like this for quite some time, & Andromeda seems to have come good for them, big time.

Piers Barnes of CSIRO has it figured . For groups of less than 20 people, divide the number of people in the group by 3 if the light is good or by 2 if the light is bad That’s his formula based on the speed which people blink at, a typical shutter time, & basic statistics. I thought that this would be good to get published befor LCA2007 shots, which we’re about to see many of. (-:

No worries. We can beat that easily . Some of the featured weather patterns are kind-of expected, some of them are just weird , but it all makes interesting reading.

It seems likely that we’ll be house-sitting for a while, come early March. It’s quite a house , too, on Sugarloaf Point, just north of Newcastle. Nearest civilisation is Seal Rocks , a small town on the beach, with a dirt road from the highway. Second-nearest civilisation is Forster . This is all in the Great Lakes area of NSW and registered as a National Estate . Now... internet connection? Dialling is going to be a PITA, if it comes to that. Two-way satt requires an 18-month contract , so may not be as appropriate as I’d hoped. I’m wondering if you know that area at all & can speak to me of wireless & other “advanced” access methods? I’m presuming that boring stuff like ADSL will be waaay out of range...

So say studies from five European countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, & Spain). So... what do your chips get cooked in? Random veggie concoction? Boiled pig? Canola oil? Olive oil? Recycled bitumen? How brave are you feeling? (-: It turns out that the usual oxidation-reducing suspects — the phenols — weren’t primarily responsible this time around, so it’s sheer olivey wonderfulness doing it? Good news for dieters: “study shows that what you eat is just as important as how much you eat” so the key principle is to find a low-calorie chocolate? (-: Also interesting, olive oil specifically protects against breast cancer . One presumes that it needn’t be physically emplaced?

Someone’s decided that fishing for anchovies will probably harm penguins , so the obvious solution is to provide more anchovies. My scaley-fish-breeding skills suck, but perhaps I can provide programmatic anchovies?

Spirit (AKA MER-A) has now been trekking around on Mars for 2 years. Opportunity (MER-B) will match that the day before Australia Day this year. That’s a better run that many cars & computers get — and think of the distance to the nearest warranty-repair place! The (Marvin) logo is kind of cute , too, but Blogger won’t link directly to it.

I ran across this recipe while reading the story of Esther to my little girl. They are very tasty biscuits! Ingredients 2 / 3 cup   butter or margarine ½ cup   sugar 1 egg ¼ cup   orange juice (the smooth kind, not the pulpy) 1 cup   white flour 1 cup   wholemeal flour ( DO NOT sub white flour! This is needed for texture!) 2 teaspoons   baking powder Various   preserves, fruit butters &/or pie fillings Method Blend butter & sugar thoroughly. Add egg & blend thoroughly. Add OJ & blend thoroughly. Add flour, ½ cup at a time, alternating white & wholemeal, blending thoroughly between each. Add the baking powder with the last ½ cup of flour. Refrigerate batter overnight or at least a few hours. Roll as thin as you can without getting holes in the batter (roll it between two sheets of wax paper lightly dusted with flour for best results). Cut out 8- or 10-cm circles. Put a dollop of filling in the middle of ...

It’s funny, but if I were to sit down & list the parts I enjoyed, I think it would come across very yawn, but the real experience was quite inspiring. One positive factor was the outcome from sticking with something and following it through. Amongst other things, some of the scenes were very spectacular (some beautiful, some unbelievably action-packed, a few tender, many hilarious), but they also had dozens of different penguin characters, & somehow managed to get them to mesh “harmoniously” together (yes, even the dis-harmonious ones). There are countless one-liners & short-but-odd conversations, for example (Mumble is the lead penguin, Gloria is his intended): Mumble: Gloria, ever since I was little I’ve been wanting to tell you that you’re so. . . Gloria: Fish. . . Mumble: Yeah, fish. You’re so fish. Gloria: No. [laughs] Look, Mumble! Fish! There’s also Mumble calling a great big penguin-eating se...

SLPWA and PLUG are organising a community watching of Happy Feet , an Australian penguin animation which trounced even James Bond in the American cinemas. That will be at 7PM on Wednesday at the MegaScreen in Warwick, which is on Beach Road near the Freeway & about ten minutes from Perth. Beach Road crosses Erindale & Wanneroo Roads to the East, & Marmion Avenue to the West. Alex, the organiser, expects to get us in for $10 a head, which is a significant discount on the standard price. You’ll need to email him (RSVP) to get included, via apolglaze at book-keepingnetwork com au. I’ll be there, as will many of Perth’s FOSS brigade. Including some with evil senses of humour. (-:

Well, that was about six times as many fireworks as I’d expect our quiet little outer Perth suburb to kick up, but it had a knock-on effect: it woke up the local flock of about 80 corellas. Eighty Corellas makes a deafening racket at zero hundred hours (they’re insecure in the dark so like to chat as they fly), & I’m amazed that the little kids didn’t wake up to the cockophony. But thankfully, they didn’t. Finally, some sleep! Well... if some neighbours kill their stereos. I think I’ll have to develop a mental trick for obliterating questions from my cortex, else the little blighters clamour to be answered even if I’m totally knackered & the clock has knocked off for the night. Unfortunately, some combination of Wikipedia & Google will usually provide several answers. Several conflicting sets, typically. Mumble.