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?