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May 31, 2006
~Bazooka Tooth zoo keep the paper route with janky funds and favors cradled by 12 empty Zelda heart containers~
Sidenotes is an interesting, somewhat elegant use of CSS and JavaScript to add side annotations, in boxes, to the sides of your main text. via
Perennially ugly site Slashdot has a CSS resdesign up. via
Now, fishing in Zelda with the Wiimote looks cool, but let's focus on the most important thing here... via
The new Zelda is soooo pretty!
As Joystiq describes Zelda: Twilight Princess:
You should take a gander at the ridiculously gorgeous images (presumably from the Wii version of the game) and, as a mental exercise, try to formulate in words just how good they make you feel inside.
We're going for "like our internal organs have been replaced with laughing chocolate clowns."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2006
"'My lens needs polishing.' But after a moment he bounces back.' And yet, even though I have my moments of doubt, I think my lens really is clear.'"
Spent most of today learning little things like setting .htaccess passwords in Apache, Boolean operators as utilized by mdfind, and basic uses of the sed command.
However, here are some beautiful examples of ice lens photography:
Matthew Wheeler took his first picture through an ice lens in response to a challenge by Scientific American and CBC calling on listeners to light a fire with a lens made entirely of ice.
Too easy by far - Matthew took it one step farther and started photographing the natural beauty of his surroundings through the ice lenses he made.
These stunning photographs are the result of that simple experiment.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 29, 2006
"The rounded world is fair to see, / Nine times folded in mystery."
I learned how to do rounded corners in CSS.
At first, I was going to use the Mountaintop Corners described at A List Apart, as they're rather elegant, but I wanted fluidity both vertical and horizontal.
Instead, I decided to use Scott Schiller's rounded CSS corners, which do provide that flexibility, albeit with some awkward extra <div>s. He has another page that provides some more detail on rounded CSS corners, like an image inventory.
I also considered using Ryan Thrasher's simple rounded corner CSS boxes, but chose not to for some reason I do not at this point remember.
..and um, that's pretty much all I did today ;P
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2006
Overview: Video streaming under Mac OS X Tiger with Apache, PHP, VLC, and Spotlight
Wow I feel incredibly nerdy.
I just spent the last 36 hours or so perfecting video streaming under Mac OS X.
The easiest way to stream is with QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server. It has a directory, and if you drop any video in it, the Streaming Server recognizes it and if anyone connects over RTSP and asks for that URL, the video starts playing. Easy as pie.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have on-the-fly transcoding. That means each video has to be pre-ripped at a low bitrate and "hinted" for streaming. Pain in the ass and a waste of space. I want to stream over the Internet, but anything I rip has a bitrate in the megabits. Real-time transcoding is a necessity.
So that leaves me with Video LAN Client, which is...a work in progress. Sometimes it crashes when I add a few hundred videos at once to the playlist. Plus, when it does work, it doesn't save the playlist with hierarchies. It's just a flat list of videos, without even their full filepaths, making it damned near impossible to identify what is what. That means I can't depend on VLC to keep track of my whole library.
Now, VLC works admirably for streaming a small playlist. It has a limited VOD service called VLM, but it's awkward to have more than half a dozen videos listed in it. VLC streams single files like a champ, but it crushes under the weight of a few hundred gigs of moving pictures.
Instead, I had to find another way to build a playlist. My solution is a mix of VLC, Apache, PHP, and Spotlight.
3 http sessions running on different ports: The first encapsulates the video. The second is the VideoLAN http interface. The third is Apache.
I made a CGI script in PHP. It scans my hard drives using Spotlight, looking for all video files. It then outputs a list of them in HTML. Each line of the playlist PHP composes is a link, that, when clicked, loads the selected movie into VLC and presents the VLC web remote. Press play, and the movie is transcoded in real time to a sane bitrate and streamed over http.
Example workflow:
Colin in South Korea wants to see the latest episode of Lost some video podcast that certainly isn't protected by intellectual property rights..
In Safari, he goes to http://mymachine:23423, which is the PHP-generated playlist.
He scrolls down the alphabetical list until he sees the TV episode video podcast, and clicks on it.
The browser window refreshes and the VLC web remote appears, with the Lost episode video podcast in its playlist.
Colin clicks play.
In VLC on his laptop, Colin selects "Open Network Stream" from the File menu, and enters http://mymachine:23421 as the media resource locator.
A second later, the video starts playing.
My friend Asher made it even better, by redoing the PHP script to sort files into directory hierarchies instead of just display the full file path.
The benefit of this system is that I don't have to keep an ordered playlist of movies for video on demand. Instead, the second a video hits my hard drives, it'll show up in this list. From anywhere in the world, I can access my whole video library and select anything I want to play.
If I can make this a little easier, and maybe even if I can't, I'll try to put together a full tutorial.
Useful links:
The power of mdfind has a lot more info about Spotlight's command line interface than "man mdfind" provides.
Some faint inspiration came from episode 1x09 of Hak5.
Enabling PHP on Mac OS X was invaluable, as was Kevin Hemenway's introduction to PHP and Apache in Tiger
Direct lifting of code from streaming MythTV to your cellphone.
The idea of trans-Pacific streaming came from Miles Evans' VLC streaming tutorial.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
"I hope it feels so good to be right. There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others, is there?"
A new scientific study provides evidence that the brain stores memories we cannot consciously recall: via
In the current study, Cabeza and his colleagues used a sophisticated imaging technique to detect brain activity in the medial temporal lobes (MTL) of test subjects exposed to "new" and "old" experiences. Located deep inside the brain, the MTL is known to play a role in a person's ability to determine whether something happened in the past.
The researchers first showed 16 study subjects a list of words. The subjects were then placed in a device called a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and shown another list of words, some of them "old" words previously viewed and others "new" words not previously viewed. The researchers observed brain activity, by measuring changes in blood flow picked up by the scanner, while participants looked at the words one at a time.
When subjects viewed an old word, they exhibited heightened activity in the rear portion of the MTL, whether or not they correctly stated that the word was old, Cabeza said. "This indicates that the brain has the correct answer even if we don't consciously think we've seen the word before," he said.
So why would a person make a mistake when asked about an event's oldness, if his or her brain holds the correct answer?
The researchers found that when a subject correctly reported seeing a "new" word, the scanner indicated that there was heightened activity mainly in a front portion of the MTL, rather than in the rear portion, as happens with old words. But when a subject mistakenly classified as new a word that was actually old, activity increased in both parts of the MTL, Cabeza said. This may lead the MTL to give mixed messages, resulting in an incorrect conscious response, he said.
Cannes adored Clerks II, according to Kevin Smith: via
When the flick ended and the credits started rolling, a standing ovation began that lasted a full eight minutes. It was surreal and wonderful, and it just kept going and going. I looked to Harvey (Weinstein, our boss), that old Cannes war-horse, to see if the cast and I should start heading out of the theater: as it was two in the morning and the applause wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. But from two aisles back, he responded with a waving “No” finger at me, mouthing the words “Don’t move.” So we all stayed put.
By the time the credits ended, I figured the audience was done applauding as well.
But they weren’t.
They just kept on clapping.
The other day Bush admitted "Bring 'em on!" was a mistake, without actually apologizing for it. He pulled out the classic "I'm sorry if you misinterpreted me" line.
On Thursday, Bush said the remark was "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong message to people."
"I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. "Wanted, dead or alive"; that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted," he said.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 26, 2006
"Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen."
None of the fiction books I've read in the past three months has had a proper ending:
This is getting to be ridiculous. I crave plot resolution!
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 25, 2006
"The internet. More than just fun and games. It has become the global source of infinite uses!"
New technique for rounded CSS corners
Is the MPAA hacking BitTorrent trackers like Torrentspy?
The neo-cons' pet PR firm was behind the false story that Iran makes religious minorities wear identifying marks à la Nazi Germany, apparently part of an effort to drum up the public for another war?
And to continue a conversation from earlier today...
Porn and technological progress:
Both English and Italian can trace their emergence as popular tongues partly to pornography. Before the fourteenth century, the gentry of England spoke as much French as English,(9) while the Italian language was a hodgepodge of Latin-derived tongues varying from city-state to city-state.(10) Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387) and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-51), larded with the sexy and the scatological, passed in manuscript from hand to hand and read aloud to a largely illiterate populace, helped create national languages in both countries.
But two less noble works did more to popularize print and bring literacy to the masses than the scholarly works. These were Pietro Aretino's Postures (1524)(14) and Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1530-40).(15) Of the two, the Postures was the more pornographic in the strict sense, a series of engravings of sexual positions, each with a ribald sonnet. Rabelais' work, on the other hand, instantly entered the canon, where it has remained ever since. His tales of the two courtly giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, the vinous monk Friar John and the reprobate scholar Panurge, are classics of satire and adventure, spoofing every vestige of the Middle Ages from feudal war to scholasticism to law to religion, with hearty doses of sex and scatology. Playful governesses introduce Gargantua to sex;(16) Gargantua's horse pisses an army away;(17) a woman scares the devil away by exposing her vagina;(18) Panurge scatters musk on a fine lady who scorned him, exciting the dogs of Paris to rapine and rut.
It was not long, however, before the Civil War taught photography two new uses. The first and more famous was the battlefield photography of Mathew Brady.(26) The second, the more infamous, was pornography.(27) Soldiers demanded more than letters from home, they demanded erotica. So great was the traffic to the front, not only of dirty books, but soon of erotic daguerreotypes and photographs, that Congress passed the first U.S. law proscribing obscenity via the mails.
One of the first uses of pay-cable was pornography: people would pay to watch X- and R-rated films at home.
What were people watching on these early videotapes? The early home video rental stores, the outlets that drove Betamax from the market, were almost exclusively pornographic, drawing on the same clientele as early nickelodeons.(42) The same was true of home video sales.(43) It was not until the mid-1980s that first, local videorental stores, and next, national chains like Blockbuster entered the field with videos for the mass market. By then, porn had shown the way.
Other participants in the communications revolution that have been helped by pornography include "900" phone numbers,(44) CD-ROMs, and laser discs.(45) In fact, the French Minitel, which many see as the prototype of the computer-mediated telephone system, owes whatever success it has attained largely to its use for exchanging sexual messages.(46)
Here's how it works. Your Sinulator package includes the transmitter, a vibrator and a receiver. You download the client application from Sinulator.com. During installation, you connect the transmitter to a USB port. (If you use Windows XP, make sure to read the installation note in the user guide and save yourself some frustration.)
When you're all installed and have the client running, you attach your toy to the wireless receiver and switch it on. Finally, you go to Sinulator.com and choose a name for your toy. After that, anyone who knows your toy's name can set your toy a-buzzin' using the Sinulator control panel. Neither of you has to register or divulge any personal information -- not even an e-mail address.
The control panel looks like a grown-up version of a driving toy for baby, with buttons and levers and sliders that you manipulate with your mouse. I laughed when I first saw it -- now you can have sex and drive a race car at the same time! If that's not a popular male fantasy, I don't know what is.
But it gets even better. You probably want to stick to the dashboard if you're at the office, but for home use, the Interactive Fleshlight is where it's at. The Fleshlight is a standard, sleeve-style vibrator for men, with a twist: It's also a transmitter. It measures the speed and force of each thrust and communicates those metrics to the software, which translates them into vibration and pulse on the other end.
In other words, a man can be thrusting in Cleveland while a woman is penetrated in Seattle, and the cybersex experience gets one step closer to the holodeck.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 24, 2006
"We each create a story, a narrative, a picture, an allegory, a model for what's going on here and then we fight, sometimes to the death, to, if not make others believe in that model, we fight to be able to keep believing in it ourselves."
Tom DeLay's defense fund website uses a Colbert Report piece on their front page, apparently without realizing that Colbert is a satirist...
This is Colbert's greatest triumph I think. They have taken the trojen satire deep into their citadel.
posted by fleetmouse at 8:40 PM EST on May 24
Bruce Schneier has a self study course in block cypher cryptanalysis on his website. via
ZoneMinder is a Linux-based security camera system.
Consuming bad media degrades our ability to perceive, or Douglas Rushkoff cuts American idol a new one:
And as an objective viewer with significant experience directing musical theater performed by people in these contestants' age group, I can assure you: they're not very good.
The girl can carry a tune, and the guy can do a good lightweight if nasal Joe Cocker imitation. They seem like nice, normal people, and I mean them no harm. They're not bad, and any community summer theater would be well served by their talents. He'd be a passable Harold Hill and she could do the girl in Finian's Rainbow, no problem. Not on Broadway, but for their friends.
But they're not particularly good. Any kid off the TV cast of Fame or in the movie Camp could sing them off the stage. And their efforts at becoming idol-worthy appears to have twisted them into even more perverse caricatures of the stars they're aping - or of themselves - than is probably healthy.
I've got no problem with real people singing and having a good time. And I know of many "professional" musicians who are outrageously bad (Coldplay's pathetic imitation of Radiohead is just one sad example). And I wouldn't normally pick on happy amateurs doing their thing.
But these aren't happy amateurs. These are amateurs in the way that amateur porn performers are amateurs. And they're being sold to America as idols through the process of sheer saturation. I assure you, most viewers who look at these two as talented didn't see them the same way back during those first audition programs. The audience as been conditioned to accept this inanity the same way radio audiences are conditioned through ClearChannel programming and TV viewers learn to like the evening primetime schedule.
Consuming bad media degrades our ability to perceive.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2006
"Your map is inexact. These landmarks... is this a river?" "No, it's a wavy line. I didn't draw it, I just transcribed it. I told you, I don't even know if it is a map." "Let's assume it is."
For his new project, the writer/director of Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly, got Sarah Michelle Gellar to play a porn star.
I expected more news from Seymour Hersh's bit on the NSA spying but all I got was this corroborating nugget:
Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”
Supposedly the Lost writers are big Robert Anton Wilson fans but I can't find the origin of this rumor or whether or not it's true.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 22, 2006
"...called _All That Violence_? That could be violent!" "Well see that's the ironic thing, it's not that violent." "Well, I don't want you knowing about irony."
It seems that 1 out of every 136 Americans is in jail or prison.
This sand castle bundt cake mold is awesome.
You can easily replace the hard drive in the new MacBooks.
The Nintendo Wii is going to use standard Bluetooth for its controllers.
Uh yeah...that's it...and no the title doesn't in any way reference the post. I was just watching an episode of Home Movies and thought that exchange between Brendan and his mom was amusing.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 21, 2006
"Bright, shiny futures are overrated anyway."
I finally got around to reading Rolling Stone's "Worst President in History?" feature:
Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.
Profile of Theodore Diener, discoverer of the viroid. via
Like a virus, the viroid invades a cell and hijacks its reproductive mechanisms. It forces the cell to duplicate the viroid's RNA instead of its own. The viroid has no DNA. RNA and DNA are nucleic acids, the molecules of heredity; with the exception of viroids and some viruses, all genes are made of DNA.
The difference between viroids and RNA viruses is that viroids have no protective protein coat. The scientific dogma in 1971 was that an organism with no protein wasn't supposed to be able to replicate itself, even with a host cell's help.
Awesome time-delay photo of the space shuttle's launch parabola. via
Battlestar Galactica's 3rd season to be a lot darker. via
"In the upcoming episodes, the simplest way to explain what happens is that the wheat is separated from the chaff," Callis said in an interview at this month's Saturn Awards in Universal City, Calif. "I'm not actually sure at this moment which I belong to, which bothers me, whether I'm the wheat or the chaff. All I know is that we are necessarily separated."
Callis said comparisons of the coming third season, in which the humans struggle under Cylon domination, to France under the Nazi occupation of World War II are apt.
"And the first few scripts of this particular season are phenomenal," he said, "and far darker and more gritty and more worrying than anything that you have seen before. I really am not just saying that. I remember just reading it going, 'My God almighty, this is remorseless and relentless.' And as such should be very gripping television. Even though it's very, I think, the word is dystopic."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 20, 2006
totally at a loss for a title today
Judith Miller got some interesting leaks in the summer of 2001: via
"I had begun to hear rumors about intensified intercepts and tapping of telephones. But that was just vaguest kind of rumors in the street, indicators … I remember the weekend before July 4, 2001, in particular, because for some reason the people who were worried about Al Qaida believed that was the weekend that there was going to be an attack on the United States or on a major American target somewhere. It was going to be a large, well-coordinated attack. Because of the July 4 holiday, this was an ideal opportunistic target and date for Al Qaida.
My sources also told me at that time that there had been a lot of chatter overheard -- I didn't know specifically what that meant -- but a lot of talk about an impending attack at one time or another. And the intelligence community seemed to believe that at least a part of the attack was going to come on July 4. So I remember that, for a lot of my sources, this was going to be a 'lost' weekend. Everybody was going to be working; nobody was going to take time off.
"Even that weekend, there was lot else going on. There was always a lot going on at the White House, so to a certain extent, there was that kind of 'cry wolf' problem. But I got the sense that part of the reason that I was being told of what was going on was that the people in counter-terrorism were trying to get the word to the president or the senior officials through the press, because they were not able to get listened to themselves.
"This was a case wherein some serious preparations were made in terms of getting the message out and responding, because at the end of that week, there was a sigh of relief. As somebody metaphorically put it: 'They uncorked the White House champagne' that weekend because nothing had happened. We got through the weekend … nothing had happened.
"But I did manage to have a conversation with a source that weekend. The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up. The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of Al Qaida. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole. And one Al Qaida operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'
How-to build a RAID 5 server for US$875 or less.
The cool thing about my system is that it's more powerful than anything out there below $1000 (tax included) and it's scalable thanks to Ubuntu Linux. In the latest kernel and beta version of mdadm, growing a RAID 5 system is not only possible, it's dead easy! It would be very simple to buy another SATA controller card or the same HighPoint RocketRAID 1640 card since I know it works and attach another 4 hard drives in the future and grow that into the present RAID 5 array. At this point, I'm glad I got this beast of a case. The 500W should be sufficient for another 4 drives + controller card. Of course, this is well into the future as I've only filled up 25% of current RAID disk space.
LOCKSS is a spider used by libraries to archive academic journals.
Some people are disappointed with the limitations of the Wiimote.
While the light gun tech can aim relatively well, it is nowhere near as accurate as a mouse. This means that FPS games will not be better played with the Wiimote. And while the accelerometers can detect motion, it cannot tell exactly where the controller is in 3D space nor even exactly how much you have moved it. This means you will not be able to control the next Fight Night on Wii by punching like a real boxer in real time. Alas, virtual realty has not arrived to this extent just yet.
Or has it? On May 11th (last Thursday, the day I was asking Nintendo® all of these questions at E3!) a new alliance with PixArt Imaging Incorporation was announced that will provide "sensor tracking for Wii Controller". "PixArt's Multi-Object Tracking™ engine (MOT sensor™) technology can track multiple objects in an unbelievably quick and responsive way. As a result, Nintendo® can enable its new gaming controller to interact with people by tracking the movement of the Wii Remote." So was the Wiimote at E3 final hardware
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2006
"With thy long levell’d rule of streaming light."
I'm considering installing Darwin Streaming Server to stream video to my cellphone...via
Lost is moving to a new airing schedule next season with few reruns: seven weeks of straight episodes in the early fall, then nothing until February, when the rest of the season will run week after sweet week.
"We really wanted to just say to the audience, 'Listen, it's going to be on for this block here and then we'll bring it back and it will run straight through,'" explains ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson. "So yes, the plan is that Lost will come on in the fall in the first or second week of the season, run for seven episodes and then Day Break will launch into that period and Lost will come back in January or early February and run straight through for the remainder for the season."
Combining a flash image and a no-flash image to get perfect color.
Ridiculously expensive pretty font called Divergently
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2006
"The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee."
The chimp/human link. This is kinda creepy:
The results show that the two species split no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. Moreover, the speciation process was unusual -- possibly involving an initial split followed by later hybridization before a final separation.
Putty-nosed monkeys can string hoots together to communicate different ideas. The part that's fascinating to me is that the monkeys, by using the same string of warning calls to mean "move on there's a predator here" and "move on let's go somewhere new," demonstrate a limited sense of metaphor.
It may not be exactly poetry, but a species of monkey has demonstrated an unsuspected level of articulacy. Researchers working in Nigeria have found that putty-nosed monkeys can use their two warning calls as 'building blocks' to create a third call with a different meaning. It's the first example of this outside humans, say the researchers.
Putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans) live in family groups, usually led by a dominant male who keeps a wary eye out for their two main enemies — leopards and eagles. A circling eagle will cause a male to warn his troop by making a series of calls called 'hacks', whereas a lurking leopard will prompt him to shout out a string of 'pyow' sounds. Different predators require different warnings because the treetops are generally the safest place to hide from a leopard, but staying under cover is more advisable when an eagle is around.
These two calls seem to be the only sounds in the putty-nosed monkey's repertoire. Researchers had observed that the monkeys sometimes use these calls in an apparently non-meaningful way: to yell at a fellow monkey, for example, without communicating a specific message.
But now zoologists have realized that at least one combination of these sounds has its own distinct meaning: up to three pyows followed by up to four hacks seems to mean 'let's move on'. This call sequence is given both in response to the presence of predators or simply as a sign to head for new terrain.
I was busy today, so that's it.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 17, 2006
"What's a Nubian?"
There's a G5-optimized build of x264, the open-source encoder for H.264 video.
Test 1:
video options: 640x272 ; no crop ; 1000kbs ; PAL
x264 options: two-pass encoding ; i4x4 analysis ; B-frames
audio options: AAC 192kb ; 48 kHz; Stereo; CBR
Results:
x264 (ffmpegX standard):
pass 1: 30.30 fps
pass 2: 36.73 fps
x264 (Phil's ultimate G5-only):
pass 1: 41.73 fps (+ 36,73%)
pass 2: 47.45 fps (+ 29,19%)
Ancient Egyptians shared administrative duties with their colonists in Nubia.
"The study of culture contact in the past has conventionally used ideas of unidirectional change and modification of a subordinate population by a socially dominant group. The idea that authoritarian European powers forced changes in submissive native cultures dominated this work," explains Michele R. Buzon (University of Alberta). "However, more recent research has reevaluated these traditional notions and suggests that this model might not be appropriate for all situations of culture contact."
Through an examination of the archaeological site of Tombos, a strategic point of control in Egyptian-controlled Nubia, Buzon sought to determine whether the people buried in a colonial cemetery were immigrants from Egypt or Nubians who had adopted Egyptian practices. Comparing skull measurements with other revealing features such as tomb architecture, grave objects, and burial position, Buzon founds that the imperial officials who were buried in symbolically-marked tombs were of both Egyptian and Nubian descent. Egyptians were generally laid to rest on their backs in small tombs or pyramids, while Nubians were buried in fetal position on a bed or cow's skin.
"The combination of burial practices found at Tombos suggests that intermarriage between Nubians and Egyptians was likely," Buzon writes. "The results of this study suggest that both local native Nubians and Egyptian immigrants participated in the administration of Nubia during this time."
Apple has closed the source of the OS X kernel for Intel processors. via
Lasers can make golden buckyballs: via
Elemental gold has a number of useful properties. In large quantities, such as for a ring or an earring, gold reacts with little and retains its expensive luster. But in very tiny quantities, at the scale of individual atoms (or "nanoscale"), gold's character changes dramatically.
"It becomes highly reactive, a very good catalyst," Wang said. He and his team continued to work with gold at the nanoscale. Years ago, Wang's team created a pyramid made of 20 gold atoms.
Nobody thought anything besides carbon could form a buckyball, he said. But before coming to Richland, Wang had worked with Richard Smalley, the Rice University scientist who led the team that discovered the original buckyball. Over the past few years, Wang joined others searching for evidence of this happening in metals.
In order to look for golden buckyballs, Wang and his team used a laser to vaporize gold. The zapped gold atoms condensed inside a vacuum and formed clusters varying in size from two to 100 atoms, Wang explained. That was the easy part, he said.
"The rest of it was detective work," Wang said. It took them years of analyzing the spectroscopic signatures of these clusters to determine if any might be hollow, he said. What they eventually were able to discern is that only clusters of 16 to 18 atoms form hollow cages. Fewer atoms, Wang said, and you get flat gold. More than 18 atoms, he said, and it's just solid gold.
So what good are these golden buckyballs? How will they be put to use?
"You can put another atom in the center," Wang said. Depending upon the kind of atom put at the center of the cage, he said, you could create a material with novel chemical, magnetic or even optical properties.
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May 16, 2006
"Brendon there's nothing wrong with lying to women. Or the government. Or parents. Or God."
I got a new 400GB Hitachi hard drive this afternoon, so that took up a lot of my time...as did some other things:
The New Super Mario Bros. game for the Nintendo DS came out today. It kicks ass. Best Mario ever on a portable. The graphics looks great, the controls are fluid, and it's fun.
The final season of Home Movies came out on DVD today. It comes with a bonus CD with the dozens of songs Brendon Small composed for the animated series.
But wait, there's more! Apple finally released the MacBook today, the MacBook Pro's little 13" brother. Its specs are surprisingly high and its price is surprisingly low; the only thing that makes it weaker than the Pros is its integrated Intel graphics chipset. I'm very tempted by these...that 13" screen packs in nearly as many pixels as my 15" PowerBook's. Oh yeah, and the high-end model comes in black. Apple is hilariously brazen in how they price things—a $150 premium for black plastic as opposed to white? Still, I'm tempted to pay that surcharge =) Anyway, there's also a new keyboard layout that's pretty funky looking, a new small power adapter, and the nifty design feature of having all the ports on the left side of the laptop.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 15, 2006
"No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition."
SecureDVD is a collection of the best Linux Live security CDs on a multiboot DVD. via
As a marketing gimmick, Skype's got free PC-to-Phone calls for the rest of the year.
ABCNews has been warned that the federal government is spying on journalists' phone records in order to ferret out leakers. It just goes further and further...I've said it before and I'll say it again, this administration's downfall will be hubris. They don't know their place in history. via
ABCNews now has confirmation that the FBI is using National Security Letters, under the PATRIOT Act, to spy on journalists in order to discover their sources. via
Microsoft's new policy is to offer people who pirate Windows a $100 discount off a retail purchase of the OS. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 14, 2006
"A magician is just an actor playing the part of a magician."
In order to demonstrate just how broken America's patent system is, someone has patented a teleportation device by using a convincing patter of pseudoscientfic technobabble. It reads like Stargate SG-1 fanfic. I can so imagine Lt. Col. Carter saying this:
Abstract
A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
[0021] It is the object of this invention to teleport a human being from one location to another by creating a pulsed gravitational wave traveling through hyperspace that asymmetrically compresses and expands the quantum wells of the human energy being. This spacetime curvature distortion of the hyperspace quantum wells pulls the physical body out of dimension such that the human being is teleported along with the wave. As the pulsed wave moves on past the quantum wells, the human is brought back into dimension at some distant location. The invention requires (1) a device that will generate a wormhole between space and hyperspace, and (2) a device that will generate a gravitational wave which can be inserted through the wormhole.
[0022] Referring to FIG. 11, a magnetic vortex wormhole generator has already been developed which generates a wormhole between space and hyperspace as described in a previous patent application entitled Magnetic Vortex Wormhole Generator. Using this generator, it was found that smoke blown through one side of the coil does not appear on the other side of cylindrical coil. The smoke flows through the wormhole and appears in a hyperspace co-dimension. It was this experiment that resulted in making first contact with the androids of the Grey aliens who told me, in a remote viewing session, that "We saw you blowing smoke into hyperspace."
The spirit of that reminds me of Alan Sokal's classic hoax essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." It is an exemplar of the fine art of bullshit:
More recently, a small group of physicists has returned to the full nonlinearities of Einstein's general relativity, and -- using a new mathematical symbolism invented by Abhay Ashtekar -- they have attempted to visualize the structure of the corresponding quantum theory.45 The picture they obtain is intriguing: As in string theory, the space-time manifold is only an approximation valid at large distances, not an objective reality. At small (Planck-scale) distances, the geometry of space-time is a weave: a complex interconnection of threads.
Finally, an exciting proposal has been taking shape over the past few years in the hands of an interdisciplinary collaboration of mathematicians, astrophysicists and biologists: this is the theory of the morphogenetic field.46 Since the mid-1980's evidence has been accumulating that this field, first conceptualized by developmental biologists47, is in fact closely linked to the quantum gravitational field48: (a) it pervades all space; (b) it interacts with all matter and energy, irrespective of whether or not that matter/energy is magnetically charged; and, most significantly, (c) it is what is known mathematically as a ``symmetric second-rank tensor''. All three properties are characteristic of gravity; and it was proven some years ago that the only self-consistent nonlinear theory of a symmetric second-rank tensor field is, at least at low energies, precisely Einstein's general relativity.49 Thus, if the evidence for (a), (b) and (c) holds up, we can infer that the morphogenetic field is the quantum counterpart of Einstein's gravitational field. Until recently this theory has been ignored or even scorned by the high-energy-physics establishment, who have traditionally resented the encroachment of biologists (not to mention humanists) on their ``turf''.50 However, some theoretical physicists have recently begun to give this theory a second look, and there are good prospects for progress in the near future.51
It is still too soon to say whether string theory, the space-time weave or morphogenetic fields will be confirmed in the laboratory: the experiments are not easy to perform. But it is intriguing that all three theories have similar conceptual characteristics: strong nonlinearity, subjective space-time, inexorable flux, and a stress on the topology of interconnectedness.
Pretty pong game with plasma effects. Pity's it's PC only. via
Rumor has the NSA whistle-blower from December dropping some more bombshells this week. via
The observatory was built of 127 blocks of granite each three meters (10 feet) high and regularly placed in circles in an open field, she said.
Cabral said the site resembles a temple which could have been used as an observatory, because the blocks are positioned to mark the winter solstice. In December, the path of the sun allows rays to pass through a hole in one of the blocks, possibly to calculate agricultural activity and religious rituals.
Its exact age has been difficult to determine, but based on ceramic fragments found nearby, archaeologists estimate it between 500 and 2,000 years old.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 13, 2006
"Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just want to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with."
Ooops. I'm cheating cuz I'm out of time to post today. Was watching a movie and expected it to end sooner than it did. As such, just 2 links, no quotes, and no via links...
Douglas Coupland writing a new book called JPod.
Major new security flaws in Diebold's electronic voting machines.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2006
"I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life."
Fun with electric road signs: via
This was the first time I had attempted a prank like this, so I expected the control box to be locked, and the programming functions password-protected. I was wrong. First of all, the control cabinet had no lock. Swinging open its door, I found a deliciously inviting handheld keypad, then took a wild guess and pushed a button labeled STOP. The display on the control box flashed ENTER PASSWORD. I was about to give up in disgust when I noticed that someone had written the password in large Sharpie lettering above the box.
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is funny, in a way: via
"Everybody deserves good competition. People have been telling me that for years."
Captain Cook's ships' logs prove shift of the magnetic poles is a modern phenomenon: via
By sifting through ships’ logs recorded by Cook and other mariners dating back to 1590, researchers have greatly extended the period over which the behaviour of the magnetic field can be studied. The data show that the current decline in Earth's magnetism was virtually negligible before 1860, but has accelerated since then.
Until now, scientists had only been able to trace the magnetic field’s behaviour back to 1837, when Carl Friedrich Gauss invented the first device for measuring the field directly.
The field’s strength is now declining at a rate that suggests it could virtually disappear in about 2000 years. Researchers have speculated that this ongoing change may be the prelude to a magnetic reversal, during which the north and south magnetic pole swap places.
But the weakening trend could also be explained by a growing magnetic anomaly in the southern Atlantic Ocean, and may not be the sign of a large scale polarity reversal, the researchers suggest.
A large-scale reversal might indeed be underway, Gubbins says, but the acceleration of the magnetic decline since the mid-1800s is probably due to a local aberration of the magnetic field called the South Atlantic Anomaly. "It looks like that's responsible for most of the fall we're seeing," he says.
This patch of reversed magnetic field lines covering much of South America first appeared in about 1800, according to the ship-log data. It slowly grew in strength, and by about 1860 it was large enough to affect the overall strength of the planet's magnetic field, Gubbins says.
If the field does flip 2000 years from now, the Northern Lights will be visible all over the planet during the transition, and solar radiation at ground level will be much more intense, with no field to deflect it.
A truly secure credit card. via
SiPix Imaging (www.sipix.com) and SmartDisplayer (www.smartdisplayer.com) developed the first flexible display panel to be embedded into an ISO compliant payment card. The revolutionary One Time Password (OTP) DisplayCard enables cardholders to generate and display a dynamic passcode for one-time use. During an online merchant checkout or home banking login, the cardholder obtains a new, unique number by pressing a button on the card. As prompted, the cardholder then enters the number, proving the presence of the card, and completes the transaction. With the DisplayCard, banks can strengthen online banking sign-on by enabling two-factor authentication.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2006
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter."
This morning, I looked for the origin of the phrase "salt of the earth." It's a positive phrase, which puzzles me, since nothing grows on salted earth—as demonstrated last night on Lost. Turns out it comes from the New Testament, Matthew 5:13 :
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
The idea, I guess, is that Christ's followers preserved the world from spiritual decay. Anyway, the exact wording "salt of the earth" was coined by William Tyndale, whose bible was co-opted by the King James Version. The basic idea seems to go back at least as far as the Vulgate with its "sal terrae":
vos estis sal terrae quod si sal evanuerit in quo sallietur ad nihilum valet ultra nisi ut mittatur foras et conculcetur ab hominibus
However, I ran across an alternate etymology for the phrase, which claims that "salt of the earth" comes from the Jewish salt miners of Morocco.
If you go to Fez you must visit the Jewish quarter. This is in the old part and is called the Mallah.
In the past the Jews did a lot of salt mining and were very useful to the community, and so, they say, the expression 'salt of the earth' - which you and I always believed to have come from St Matthew's Gospel - was born.
Whether or not that origin story is true, it did lead me to some nice information on salt and Judaisim (and other religions)...most notably, the Kosher laws grew out of salt preservation techniques. The coolest bit of info in that last link is that the Star of David (aka the Jewish Star or Seal of Solomon) is the best shape for a straw frame for growing salt crystals in a vat of sea water.
In the courtyard of Solomon's Temple stood what the Old Testament calls a "molten sea," said to have held 2,000 baths, for salting meat. It was also reputed to have been used by the celebrants to wash their hands and feet before entering the sanctuary. According to one source, the "sea" or laver was a replica of the apse, the layer that Babylonian priests used in their temple rites, except the Babylonian layer was chiselled out of stone.
The salt production technique used by the Jews in the Nile Delta evaporationpans was a simple one.
Crystallisation of salt in solar pans, in hot climates, occurred naturally, at the surface of the brine.
The crystals first formed float, until they become soaked - since the surface brine reaches saturation point before the cooler lower layers. Additional crystals grow beside these crystals partially submerged, rather than below them, or above them, thus a typical "funnel" or wedge form takes shape.
The specific gravity of a Sodium Chloride crystal is 2.16. and the saturated brine at 25 C contains 26.7% salt. and has a specific gravity of 1.2004. At 15 C a saturated solution may contain 26.5% salt, and has a specific gravity 1.203. Hence a solution saturated at a higher temperature is specifically lighter, even though it contains a greater quantity of salt.
It is this explanation that allowed salt makers to crystallise "blocks" or briquettes of salt on the surfaces of ponds, using floating elements such as sticks and straws to form the crusts of salt.
Thus a geometric form floating on the surface of the pan brine, or planted vertically in the shallow brine, enabled crystallisation to occur, encrusting the floating form, with salt on the brine surface
Such geometric forms , mostly made of straws, or sticks, were most efficient when constructed to allow the salt to crystallise over a large area yet not be influenced by wind and waves. These geometric forms were mainly crosses or squares with diagonal or tangential struts to strengthen the form. The most popular form of straw construction with the greatest surface area and strength, was the "Star of David".
Since salt making of this kind occurred well before most of today's religions developed, it is quite reasonable to assume that the Jews and their particular interest in salt and "kashrut" hygiene, later used the star form also as a symbol.
This next link is totally unrelated to all that salt stuff...at one point there was going to be a lot more to this post but that sodium talk took more time than I expected. If the post had been longer, there would have more random, assorted links.
Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican's astronomer, seems like a pretty cool guy.
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "nature gods" who were responsible for natural events.
Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. "Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That's why science and religion need to talk to each other," he said.
"It's not like [the Pope] has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear," he said.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2006
"Nobody looks at a Japanese tourist."
I spent most of today learning how to set up video streaming in VLC, so I don't have many links to post. Video streaming, however, is a success: I was able to stream all the way from here in Florida to South Korea. Jonathonavision is born =)
The perfect mark: via
Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. “I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them,” he said. Worley wasn’t sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. “Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters,” he said.
When I asked Worley what he wished he had done differently, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he spoke about hoping that the Abachas would get back in touch with him. However, before they could resume work on the multimillion-dollar transfer, he expected them to send the six hundred thousand dollars that he needs for restitution.
“What if they sent you a check?” Barbara demanded. “Would you put it in the bank to see if it cleared again?”
“Yeah.”
My favorite British candy Smarties is moving to all-natural dyes, and as a result will no longer come in the color blue.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2006
"It was the damnedest thing I've seen since my uncle with the two heads debated free silver and triumphantly refuted himself. An explanation would spoil it."
Tom Tomorrow has some amusing graphs of Bush's approval/disapproval ratings next to Nixon's. via
While Bush’s approval rating is still a bit higher than Nixon’s at a comparable point, his disapproval rating now exceeds or equals that of Nixon’s in every Gallup poll except one. This sole exception is the final poll in July, 1974 just before Nixon left office, when Nixon’s disapproval rating was a single point higher at 66%.
What’s really remarkable is this is WITHOUT any congressional investigation of Bush’s misdeeds, plus an economy far better (as much as it sucks for many) than in summer 1974. So Bush really has nowhere to go but down. This one is going to make sporting history.
Concerns about having Hayden, a military man, in charge of the CIA are real. Not because it's never been done before—it has of course—but because it tips the balance of the Agency in the Pentagon's favor. The National Security Act of 1947 forbids having more than one member of the Armed Forces in a leadership position at the CIA, and that slot's already filled by the Deputy Director.
MILITARY STATUS OF [CIA] DIRECTOR AND DEPUTY DIRECTORS. -(1)(A) Not more than one of the individuals serving in the positions specified in subparagraph (B) may be a commissioned officer of the Armed Forces, whether in active or retired status.
(B) The positions referred to in subparagraph (A) are the following:
(1) The Director of Central Intelligence.
(2) The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.
(3) The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management.
And who is the deputy director?
Vice Admiral Albert M. Calland III, USN.
So, of course, late yesterday saw Vice Admiral Calland pushed out of office to make way for Hayden. In other words, the Bush administration, charged with faithfully executing the law, does such a poor job of doing so that it has to have violations pointed out to it by the powerless opposition. These people are so deep in the military-industrial complex that they couldn't even imagine there would be a conflict. via
Spiraling sling-shot to space: via
At NASA's behest, Ed Schmidt and Mark Bundy of the Army Research Lab are looking at ways of firing projectiles into orbit.
The notion has a very long pedigree. Back in 1687 when Isaac Newton first came up with the theory of gravity he also introduced the concept of an orbital cannon which could fire a cannonball so fast that it would never come down. The first serious attempt to shoot into space was the High Altitude Research Program (HARP) carried out in the US in the 60’s (not to be confused with HAARP High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program so beloved of the tinfoil hat brigade). HARP used a modified 16-inch naval gun to loft projectiles to the incredible altitude of 112 miles before being cancelled in 1967.
The ARL study looks at more sophisticated approaches than your basic cannon, including a blast wave accelerator, and electro-magnetic rail gun, and an EM coil gun. But the wildest idea may be the Slingatron: a giant, hypervelocity, rapid-fire slingshot. The machine would spin a projectile faster and faster through a spiral-shaped tube, building up increasing amounts of centripetal force along the way – just like a discus-thrower, spinning himself around before a toss, or like a latter-day King David, winding up his weapon before he whacks Goliath.
Alan Kay, the guy who created SmallTalk and worked at Xerox's PARC facility and Apple, is developing Croquet: a sort of virtual reality virtual machine; a networked, cross-platform operating system; a prototypical, hyperlinkable Metaverse. You can create video-game like detailed worlds with full physics simulations, and link them with portals to other worlds. But each world is really comparable to a computer's desktop, so in a sense Croquet is a virtual-reality virtual desktop system. Each portal is like looking at another world as a floating, rotating computer screen. You "touch" it to go inside of it, or make it the main window. However, it's all networked. That means you can also have portals linking to other people's worlds, and when you go through them, you're on a computer they administrate. You can send people on "tours" which act as 3D Powerpoint presentations, and voice over IP is built in. Another way of looking at Croquet is that it's the X Window System with CAD built in. I downloaded Croquet (it has a virtual machine that runs under OS X, Linux, or Windows) and played around with it a little, and while it's cool, I don't see much future for it. It's too ugly, and the interface is incredibly confusing. But the idea is promising, and it gives me hope for the future we were supposed to have by now.
Sometimes "silver thermal grease" is really aluminum, unless you buy from Arctic Silver.
Ever the fanboy, this morning I read another longish piece on Stargate SG-1 and its 200th episode. But really, it's about the bigger milestones the series is about to reach, and its position as an ascendant media franchise. Extra tidbits include negotiations with Apple for the show to be sold at the iTunes store, and rumblings from MGM that they want to keep pouring money into the series...es...
Stargate SG-1 has sold more than 30 million individual DVDs units worldwide and is said by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. to be second in its stable only to the James Bond theatrical-film series. (MGM declines to disclose the Bond sales figures.)
The show is syndicated to Fox's owned-and-operated television stations, airs in more than 120 countries and is dubbed or subtitled in multiple languages. The franchise has spawned comic books, novels, board games and other merchandise, and an online game is in production that will let multiple players travel through galaxies as stargate explorers. An episode-download deal, via Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service, is currently being negotiated.
The producers credit Stargate SG-1 and sister series Stargate: Atlantis (heading into its third season) with generating more than $500 million U.S. for the British Columbia economy to date. MGM now spends $75 million per year to make both shows.
Only a handful of scripted series launched since 1990 — broadcast or cable — have toughed it out to 200 installments. Among them are Fox's animated workhorse The Simpsons (often quoted by SG-1 character Jack O'Neill) and X-Files (which SG-1 will surpass in longevity after episode 202), as well as NBC's ER. Gostanian pegs that number at fewer than 20.
Standing in front of the 21-foot-tall stargate prop on the set, immediately following a celebratory gathering and cake-cutting, is Sony Pictures Television executive vice president of programming Jeanie Bradley, a 30-year veteran who started out at Norman Lear's Tandem T.A.T. production company. (SPT oversees production.)
Stargate SG-1 came under her auspices after MGM was sold last year to a consortium led by Sony, Comcast Corp. and several private-equity firms. The largest single shareholder is Providence Equity Partners, which specializes in media and communications investments (including cable operator Bresnan Communications and the Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network), followed by Texas Pacific Group, known for investments in such branded companies as Continental Airlines and J. Crew. Comcast and Sony are strategic shareholders in MGM, owning 20% each.
Stargate SG-1 is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.'s new best friend, if you gauge it by the enthusiasm expressed by studio executive vice president Charles Cohen.
Since MGM's sale to an investment group last year, the sci-fi franchise has become “much more important to MGM than it had been viewed before the sale,” according to Cohen, who said wasn't actively involved with the show until the studio's new ownership came in.
“Stargate on the television side represents the same type of dynamic franchise [as the James Bond movies] for us,” Cohen says. “It's enormously important both in terms of what it contributes financially but also what it does for our image.”
These days, MGM co-produces films with Sony, so it ends up owning only 50% (at most) of what's produced. “We really aren't making a whole lot of new product that we own and finance 100%,” Cohen explains. “But Stargate we own and finance 100%, and we're very supportive of it. We're putting more money into the shows. It's very important to us that this series not only continue but maintain or exceed the quality of what came before. For instance, we're putting Richard Dean Anderson back in the show. We felt it was great for the fan base. That required some money that we hadn't budgeted, but we were very happy to spend.”
Stargate SG-1 helps keep the MGM name “in front of millions,” Cohen says. “And it helps drive other MGM products. It opens a lot of doors.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 08, 2006
~My boxcar siphons third rail juice from lost poets.~
Last week during a commercial break, Lost launched "The Lost Experience," an alternative-reality game to hold fans over during the summer break. It's about a man who died in the crash, and his book/screenplay about the fictional Valenzetti Equation, purported to predict the end of the world. via
Here's a nice profile of some guys at the University of Toronto developing Psiphon, a new peer-to-peer proxy system designed to let people in countries where the internet is censored to reach beyond their nations' firewalls. via
"It's enormous," says Deibert, 41, a nerd-meets-aging-punker kind of guy who directs the Citizen Lab at the U of T's Munk Centre for International Studies, where the trio work. "If it works the way we hope it does and is distributed worldwide, it will have a huge impact on freedom of speech."
Others watching Psiphon's progress agree. "We've been trying to circumvent both the firewalls and the censorship surveillance," says Sharon Hom, executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China. "So it's something we are very, very interested in."
Psiphon takes the concept of a third-party computer doing the work yours can't because of censorship, and protects it by relying on trusted friends and close family, to create a program the creators say is nearly fail-safe.
The Citizen Lab uses the techniques of spies to secretly deploy software it developed that automatically checks for censored websites inside various countries. Sometimes the lab performs tests remotely, taking control of unprotected computers inside the censoring country without permission. This poses an ethical controversy, but Deibert says it's for the greater good: "We don't worry about that too much."
The Lab even has "black boxes," mini-sized computers that can be "planted" discreetly inside these countries to run the tests. "This kind of research is illegal in almost every country we do it in," he adds.
The Lab can also decipher how the repressive countries filter digital information, and which technology they use. It has demonstrated that Iran compels its Internet service providers to do so. China, however, blocks mainly at its borders, where the Internet enters the country, using sophisticated routers. When someone requests a banned site, the request does not get past the gateway. China also requires Internet providers, cybercafés, and websites to filter.
How does the filtering actually work? Last week, Villeneuve ran some tests to find out how Technorati was being blocked, and it turns out, he says, China is not just filtering out the URL itself, http://www.technorati.com, but the keyword, "technorati," which will capture any other sites also carrying it.
Geeky fun at the expense of Instapundit, who is so wrong whole new sorts of physics must be created to describe it: via
Far be it from me to add anything to the trenchant political analysis already available. But as a Physics Blog, we feel it’s our duty here to point out the exciting scientific consequences that our more humanistical friends have thus far missed: the possibility that Prof. Reynolds has discovered a new state of wrongness.
You see, wrongness is a fermionic property. That is to say, a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong; you can’t pile on the wrongness to make a condensate of wrong. By the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. By the Pauli exclusion principle, you just can’t be more wrong than that!
I count four declarative statements in Instapundit’s two sentences. (”… prices would plummet,” “dictators would be broke,” “poor nations would benefit,” “we’d be called imperialist oppressors.”) Now let’s count how many time he is wrong.
So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.
jexter on May 7th, 2006 at 10:02 am
Although not a physicist, I do have a Master’s Dregree (in Science!), and believe I may be able to shed some light on this notion that Glen has discovered a new state of wrongness.
Glen Reynolds doesn’t have many sharp tools in his toolkit, and unfortunately the one he chooses to use most often when analyzing a situation also happens to be one of the dullest: Occam’s Butterknife. This states that when concidering all possible boneheaded theories for explaining what is happening around you, the one that falls most completely outside the reality-based universe is the one you should promote on your blog. Outside the reality-based universe, there is no wrong, and also no Left. There is only Right.
Hope this helps!
omnivore on May 7th, 2006 at 10:12 am
But how does this account for the current administration being unaffected by the gravity of the situation? Is it because of its density?
Lynn DeLisi and colleagues from the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and New York University School of Medicine used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to scan the brain of 10 young people who had smoked cannabis during adolescence. The participants were between 17 and 30 years old, they had smoked at least two to three times a week for one or more years during adolescence and had no personal or family history of mental health problems. They were matched for sex, age and social class of parents with 10 controls who had not smoked cannabis regularly as teenagers.
DTI is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that enables a detailed look at the organisation of nerves in the brain and the measurement of brain volume.
DeLisi and her colleagues found no significant differences in brain integrity and brain volume between cannabis smokers and non-smokers. This preliminary study suggests that moderate cannabis use has no direct adverse effects on brain structure and integrity.
I'd forgotten that incoming CIA Director Hayden is the guy who doesn't know the 4th Amendment guarantees probable cause: via
QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use --
GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But the --
GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.
QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.
GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But does it not say probable --
GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says --
QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard --
GEN. HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."
That story about how "NASA spent millions to develop the space pen while the Russians used pencils" is false, and in an ironic way—turns out that in the '50s NASA did use pencils in space, and there was a big kerfluffle with Congress. Seems that once you redesign a pencil to work in the oversized mitt of a space suit, those cost a lot too. The other twist is that NASA never paid for the development of the space pen anyway; Fisher designed it independently and had to market the writing instrument to NASA over a period of years. via
Earlier in the month, several newspapers reported that the mission would carry two pencils that cost $128.84 apiece. NASA had spent $4,382.50 to purchase 34 of the pencils.
NASA officials then had to explain to Congress and people like the president of the Elgin School Supply Company that the pencils were made of lightweight, high strength materials that could be attached to the inside of the spacecraft. The pencil housings had been expanded so that the astronauts could use them while wearing their bulky spacesuit gloves. The writing mechanism inside the housing had been procured from a local office supply house and had cost $1.75 each.
But the most sensitive items carried aboard Molly Brown were… four Pentel pencils with a total cost of $0.49. Deke Slayton “was instructed to take every precaution in preventing this item from becoming public,” wrote an investigator after the fact. It is easy to understand why: when Congress and the public were outraged about the expensive $129 mechanical pencils, they would be even madder to learn that regular (and Japanese!) pencils were carried as well.
What various documents about the Space Pen demonstrate is that NASA did not develop the Space Pen and initially did not even purchase it. We do not know how much Fisher Pen spent to develop the Space Pen, but it was private money, not government money.
To Fisher’s credit, his company produced a good pen. Within a few years NASA was indeed buying the Space Pen, which NASA called the “Data Recording Pen”, in several “configurations” designated -204, -207 and -208. The pen was carried aboard Apollo and Skylab missions. At that point, Fisher could honestly claim that the Space Pen flew in space and was used by American astronauts. Naturally, that became a key part of Fisher’s advertising campaign.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 07, 2006
"George, are unicorns real? Who made unicorns? Is a thought about unicorns a real thought?"
Through mistranslation, the King James Version of the Bible contains references to unicorns: via
In the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible we read of God questioning Job (Chapter 39:9,10):
‘Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?’
The unicorn is also mentioned in Deuteronomy 33:17, Numbers 23:22 and 24:8; Psalm 22:21, 29:6 and 92:10; and Isaiah 34:7. Nowhere in these passages is there any suggestion that anything other than a real animal is being described.
So what was the animal described in the Bible as the ‘unicorn’? The most important point to remember is that while the Bible writers were inspired and infallible, translations are another thing again. The word used in the Hebrew is ראם (re’em). This has been translated in various languages as monoceros, unicornis, unicorn, einhorn and eenhorn, all of which mean ‘one horn’. However, the word re’em is not known to have such a meaning. Many Jewish translations simply left it untranslated, because they were not sure which creature was being referred to.
Archaeology has in fact provided a powerful clue to the likely meaning of re’em. Mesopotamian reliefs have been excavated which show King Assurnasirpal hunting oxen with one horn. The associated texts show that this animal was called rimu. It is thus highly likely that this was the re’em of the Bible, a wild ox.
It appears that the reason it was shown in Assyrian (but not Egyptian) art as one-horned was as an artistic way of expressing the beauty of the fact that these horns on the rimu/re’em were very symmetrical, such that only one could be seen if the animal was viewed from one side. The first to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek probably knew that the rimu/re’em was depicted as one-horned, so they translated it as monoceros (one horn).
The real re’em or wild ox was also known as the aurochs (Bos primigenius). This was the original wild bull depicted in, for example, the famous Lascaux (Cro-magnon) cave paintings. This powerful, formidable beast is now extinct, though its genetically impoverished descendants lived on as domestic cattle.
The sci-fi standby of the shocknife is now real...a weapon, shaped as if it was a knife, with a taser-like edge. via
There's an awesome invisible bookshelf that's been floating around the better sort of link log. By hiding the thin-yet-sturdy bottom of the shelf inside the cover of the bottom book on the stack, it looks like the books are just hanging in the air, stuck to the wall by sheer force of will. Anyway, you can find the same invisible shelf here for a mere $11. via
The computer bed. OMFG. With one of these, a geek could survive in the tiniest of domiciles. Thanks to some magical hinge work, this advanced murphy bed transmogrifies from desk to bed. The best part is you don't have to ever remove anything from the desktop. The same company sells the twirly bed. That one masquerades as a bookshelf with a drop-down card table. To become a bed, it swivels—or twirls, if you will—around and swings outs. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 06, 2006
"Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!"
U.S. Circuit Judge mocks FCC's arguments in favor of tapping internet telephony. via
“Your argument makes no sense,” U.S. Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards told the lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission, Jacob Lewis. “When you go back to the office, have a big chuckle. I'm not missing this. This is ridiculous. Counsel!”
At another point in the hearing, Edwards told the FCC's lawyer that his arguments were “gobbledygook” and “nonsense.”
In an unrelated case last year affecting digital television, two of the same three judges determined the FCC had significantly exceeded its authority and threw out new government rules requiring anti-piracy devices in new video devices. Lewis was also the losing lawyer in that case, and Edwards also was impassioned then in his criticisms of the FCC.
In the current case, Edwards appeared especially skeptical over the FCC's decision to require that providers of Internet phone service and broadband services must ensure their equipment can accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA.
The new rules go into effect in May 2007.
The 1994 law was originally aimed at ensuring court-ordered wiretaps could be placed on wireless phones.
Critics said the new FCC rules are too broad and inconsistent with the intent of Congress when it passed the 1994 surveillance law, which excluded categories of companies described as information services.
The FCC asserted that providers of high-speed Internet services should be covered under the 1994 law because their voice-transmission services can be considered separately from information services. “Congress intended to cover services (in the 1994 law) that were functionally equivalent” to traditional telephones, Lewis said during the hearing in U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia.
“There's nothing to suggest that in the statute,” Edwards replied. “Stating that doesn't make it so.”
George Lucas relented, or decided to milk his cash cow a bit more, or both, and the initial theatrical release of the original Star Wars trilogy is coming to DVD. via
That means you'll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.
See the title crawl to Star Wars before it was known as Episode IV; see the pioneering, if dated, motion control model work on the attack on the Death Star; groove to Lapti Nek or the Ewok Celebration song like you did when you were a kid; and yes, see Han Solo shoot first.
Bizarre olive oil diet: via
It is almost impossible to describe what this "diet" (it's not really a diet) does. (All links are at the end of this post) A UC Berkeley professor named Seth Roberts claims to have found a way to trick the legacy brain into thinking it needs to weigh less. (Which means "lower your set point", for those who are familiar with that term)
You must MUST be able to find at least one two-hour time window each day where you have nothing but water. Nothing with any flavor of any kind is allowed--NO EXCEPTIONS--during that period, including brushing your teeth. For most people, two hours is no problem at all... but you have to be extremely careful or you risk not just eliminating the positive effect, but potentially ruining your chance of using it correctly in the future.
* In the middle of that two hour window, you must ingest one of two things... either a tablespoon of sugar dissolved in water, or a tablespoon of extra light olive oil. If either of those are not do-able for you, you're out of luck.
* The sugar water comes with the potential for a blood sugar reaction, so if you choose that instead of the olive oil, you can reduce or eliminate the effect by sipping slowly. I heat up the water, dissolve the sugar, and sip it over a half hour like really weak, sweet tea. I tried the olive oil and hated it.
* You must also... well, no, there IS nothing else. Seriously. Nothing. Eat whatever you want, do whatever you want, just take in the extra calories from either the sugar or the oil, and there's nothing more. THAT is the Shangri-La Diet. Sugar, or oil. End of story.
Even Bill Kristol thinks there's something up with Porter Goss' sudden resignation from the CIA. via
BILL KRISTOL: It wasn’t done in a routine way. I don’t think people — certainly people close to Goss did not expect this to happen. Senior congressmen and senators didn’t expect this to happen. I’m not sure the White House expected this to happen. … I do think this was sudden. It was unexpected. There will be more of a story that will come out. I don’t know what it implies for the future of the agency and Goss’ effort to shake up an institution, an institution that’s very difficult to shake up. But I do not believe it was part of a long-planned —
SHEPHARD SMITH: How the heck could it have been? In a Bush White House world, things are lined up and they’re put out in a sort of meticulous, controlled way. I can envision — if this had been planned in advance, there would have been almost an immediate announcement of a replacement, the hugs, the thank yous, probably a medal or something. Instead what we have now is a vacuum, and you have to wonder what could have gone boom like that to cause him, A) to tender the resignation and, B) for the President to accept it under these circumstances.
KRISTOL: Well you and I think alike, Shep. Either it’s brilliant minds or suspicious minds thinking alike —
SMITH: It is just out of character.
KRISTOL: It looked that way to me. What was striking about the statement in the Oval Office with the President, he didn’t say, “I will serve until my successor is confirmed,” which is the usual practice. In the written statement, he says he intends to be there for a few weeks to help ensure a smooth transition, but implying he could well leave before his successor is confirmed by the United States Senate. So again, I think there were either serious disputes or some internal problem at the agency or some scandal conceivably involving an associate of Goss’. Who knows? Something that popped this week and that caused this sudden event this Friday.
The DHS contributes to open-source security. Yep, some consultants for the Department of Homeland Security found a typo in X11 that granted root access.
It was a change from this:
if (getuid() == 0 || geteuid != 0)
to this:
if (getuid() == 0 || geteuid() != 0)
The best part was the CVS comment:
Fri Mar 10 17:29:51 2006 UTC (7 weeks, 4 days ago) by deraadt:
proper geteuid calls because suse hires people who mistype things
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May 05, 2006
~It's revolution pushing through the loose pins~
"Honorificabilitudinitatibus" is a word. Who knew?
With honour.
We are in the arena of sesquipedalian words—those a foot and a half long, whose prime characteristic is their length rather than their sense or value.
Any word used by James Joyce (in Ulysses) and William Shakespeare (in Love’s Labour Lost) can’t be entirely dismissed from the canon of English, even though the former borrowed it from the latter, who in turn borrowed it from Latin. The only other person who seems to have used it, ever, was John Taylor, a Thames waterman known as the Water Poet, in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Dave's sells an incredible adjustable heat hot sauce with a high-tech pump spray. via
"They are made out of meat" is a short film based on the carnal sci-fi short story of the same name. via
MIT keeps track of the state of IP spoofing. via
Vicente Fox backed down on legalizing drugs for personal use in Mexico after pressure from you-know-who. via
A day after his office said he would sign the measure into law, Vicente Fox said yesterday he was sending the bill back to congress for changes to make it "absolutely clear" that the possession of drugs would still be a criminal offence.
Earlier yesterday, the US embassy said it had "urged Mexican representatives to review the legislation" after fears it would increase drug tourism from the US to Mexico.
Before there were satellites, there was Project West Ford, an attempt at bouncing radio signals off a ring of tiny copper needles dispersed in a Low Earth Orbit.
In May 1963, the US Air Force launched 480 million tiny copper needles that briefly created a ring encircling the entire globe. They called it Project West Ford. The engineers behind the project hoped that it would serve as a prototype for two more permanent rings that would forever guarantee their ability to communicate across the globe.
The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.
Copper Dipoles from Project West FordThe West Ford copper needles were each 1.8 cm long and 0.0018 cm in diameter and weighed only 40 micrograms. They were designed to be exactly half of the wavelength of 8000 MHz microwaves. This length would create strong reflections when the microwaves struck the copper needles, in effect making them tiny dipole anttennae each repeating in all directions the exact same signal they received.
The first attempt at remote communications using the West Ford belt was made on May 14th, 4 days after the launch. At this point, the dipoles had not completely spread out to fill their entire orbit so they were much more densely spaced than in their final configuration. Using two 18.5 meter microwave dish antennae, Project West Ford engineers managed to send voice transmissions between Camp Parks, California and Millstone Hill, Massachusetts. The voice connection was described as "intelligible" and was transmitted at a data rate of approximately 20,000 bits per second– about the speed of a 1992-era telephone modem. But as the needles continued to disperse to their final cloud, the data rate dropped off significantly, so much so that by June 18th only 400 bits per second could be transmitted. On July 2nd, the experiment was terminated. At this time, the tiny needles were spaced about 400 meters from each other.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2006
~Riddle me with glee.~
Just a short post tonight, I was busy with a Cisco lab practical (a tweaked version of one of the NetMasterClass practice scenarios for the CCIE). On the other hand, with that I am done with what's been a somewhat busy semester, so I'll have a few weeks during which I might be able to do some housekeeping, like totally rewriting the CSS stylesheet. I think I've figured out a way to make this blog a little more legible.
Here's a concise article about John Donne: via
Donne was more than a poet. He was also a politician, a pop star of sorts, a man of God and a man of passion, a young rake and an inspired preacher. Satire and seriousness run through his poetry like veins through marble. In both his life and works, Donne represents a particularly British ideal: the adventurer-poet, the pirate-priest, exploring intellect and emotion, the sacred and the secular. Even his failings seem peculiarly British: a charm alloyed with arrogance, self-recrimination and self-irony.
His poetry is so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become cliché, the highest honour. His words are so well known that most people don’t realise they know them: “No man is an island”, “For whom the bell tolls”. “Catch a falling star,” warbled Perry Como, four centuries after Donne wrote: “Go, and catch a falling star . . . teach me to hear mermaids singing.”
Donne’s poems struggle with the paradoxes and perplexities of the things that have always mattered: love, sex, death, truth and belief. His lyrics were set to music by contemporaries, sung to the accompaniment of the cittern (a sort of lute) and played in barber shops while customers were shaved. The poems were passed on from hand to hand; various composers offered different musical versions. A 16th-century Bob Dylan, Donne’s new releases were downloaded by fans, copied and covered, just like a modern album.
He lived, at first, a rackety, rock star life. Born a Catholic, he saw his brother perish in prison, and an uncle hanged, drawn and quartered for his religion. He sailed on the 1596 naval expedition against Cádiz. He knocked around London in his show-off hat and frilly shirt, went to the theatre, wrote exquisite poetry and fell in love, a lot. The Newbattle portrait may well be an elaborate chat-up routine, a love letter in paint: Donne strikes the pose of the melancholy lover, and in the corner is written the inscription illumine tenebr(as) nostras domina: oh lady, illuminate our darkness. History does not relate who the lady was, or whether she succumbed.
In a scandal that would sit easily in the 21st century, Donne eloped with the teenage Anne More, the niece of his powerful patron. Her outraged father had the poet imprisoned. With bleak wit Donne wrote: “John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.” Their marriage produced 12 children and some of the most delightful love poetry in any language: To His Mistress Going to Bed, The Flea and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. When Anne died, at the age of 33, Donne was heart- broken: “She whom I lov’d hath paid her last debt . . .” He is thought never to have written another love poem. By then, he had been adopted into the Establishment: he renounced Catholicism, become MP for Brackley, took holy orders and ended up as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Like an ageing star, the respectable churchman looked back on the Newbattle portrait as a memento of a libertine youth, with a little embarrassment perhaps, but also a hint of pride: “That Picture of myne wch is taken in Shaddowes and was made very many yeares before I was of this profession.”
The Nintendo DS Lite is only going to cost $130. This is awesome. Makes it oh-so-much-more irresistible for those of us who've got the chunky old DS.
The DS Lite is 42% smaller in volume and 21% lighter than the original DS. Also differing from its bulky brother are the start and select buttons, which are now placed underneath the A/B/X/Y buttons. The sturdier and thicker DS stylus now attaches to the system sideways, and the microphone has been relocated to the hinge on the center of the system. The power button, now relocated to the right side of the system, is now a switch to address gamers' complaints regarding the accidental presses during gameplay.
More importantly, DS Lite's screens have been significantly upgraded, allowing up to four different levels of brightness to increase battery efficiency. Amazingly, the lowest setting on the back-lit DS Lite still outshines the original DS. According to report estimates, the battery life for the system is 15-19 hours on the lowest brightness setting, 5-8 hours on the highest. The screens also now touch when the system is closed, which now appears in a more secure clam-shell design (similar to that of the GBA SP). Of course, backward functionality is maintained with the DS Lite, as GBA cartridges can be played from the bottom side of the system by opening the "placeholder cartridge", which can be used to maintain the system's sleekness.
Wallet Notes is a pen and notepad the size of a credit card for 13 bucks. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2006
"You know, evolution didn't end with us growing thumbs. You do know that, right?"
Evolution occurs faster at the equator. The researchers appeal to heat increasing metabolism, but I think they're ignoring UV radiation. via
To investigate the reasons for this trend, Shane Wright of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues looked at the rate of molecular evolution for 45 tropical plants and compared it to that of related species living at more temperate latitudes.
The researchers examined the rate at which DNA bases in the plants' genetic code are substituted. Like characters in a four-letter alphabet, bases are DNA molecules arranged to spell out instructions for building proteins. If one of the letters—A, T, G or C—become substituted with another, the instructions can change and a dysfunctional or entirely new and useful protein can be produced.
The researchers found that tropical plants had more than twice the rate of base substitution compared to their temperate cousins.
Warmer temperatures speed up metabolism by allowing chemical reactions to occur at a faster rate, but this increased efficiency comes at a price: it produces higher quantities of charged atoms or molecules called "free radicals," which can damage proteins—including DNA. Higher metabolism also speeds up DNA replication, which is just another chemical reaction, and this can increase the number of copying mistakes that can occur.
A brief tutorial on spherical perspective. via
I'm here to undermine your world view. We always assume that what we are taught about perspective is the way we actually see. But it's not.
In the outside world there are straight lines, so we put them that way into our pictures. We have developed complicated schemes of geometrical rules to guide us. We take photos with cameras that have lenses that carefully distort the world to make it fit with the expectation that straight line should be straight. But visually they are not.
King Tut's royal member reclaimed from the dunes. via
Photographed intact by Harry Burton (1879-1940) during Howard Carter's excavation of Tut's tomb in 1922, the royal penis was reported missing in 1968, when British scientist Ronald Harrison took a series of X-rays of the mummy.
Speculation abounded that the penis had been stolen and sold.
"Instead, it has always been there. I found it during the CT scan last year, when the mummy was lifted. It lay loose in the sand around the king's body. It was mummified," Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News.
In other news pyramidally regal, the royal chamber of a Mayan pyramid has been located. via
The vizfx team for the latest X-Men film have figured out how to rejuvenate actors in post-prod. via
So who would McKellen like to see portray the young Magneto? Be advised, this next part gets a little SPOILERISH. "I'll be playing the part. [laughter] I don't know if it's in the [press] notes, the first time that Patrick Stewart and I appear in this film [X-Men: The Last Stand], we appear to be 25 years younger than we are. And that's been done by a technology never used in film before, which involves no makeup, no special effects whatsoever. We just go into the studio and do the scene as is, and then they morph our faces on to photographs of ourselves 25 years ago. Lo and behold, there we are."
He continued, "They can take any shaped person and they can slim you down, they can build you up, they can bring out your shoulders, change the style and color of your hair. Remove every wrinkle. They removed so many wrinkles from my face, I looked so young that [X-Men director] Brett Ratner said, 'You've got to put a few wrinkles back. It's looking ridiculous.' So it would mean that I could play myself at 25, feasibly. As long as I can keep myself lithe and sounding young."
"I mean, that's the big story of this movie is once the stars realize that they don't have to have facelifts anymore, at least as far as their work is concerned. Meryl [Streep] and I can go on playing Romeo and Juliet for the next 20, 30 years. It's no problem. It's astonishing. It's like airbrushing but for the moving picture."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 02, 2006
"Apparently the pratfall is the peak of all humor. It's not a pretty picture of the human race, Mike."
IBM's developed something very useful for nanotechnology, a new method for molecule sorting and delivery based on the atomic force microscope.
The method is based on the atomic force microscope (AFM), an instrument invented by an IBM Nobel Laureate 20 years ago that performs nanoscale operations using a tiny cantilever with a cone-shaped tip at its end. When an electrical field is applied to the tip, molecules will slide up or down its surface at characteristic speeds. By modifying the tip's surface and varying the strength and duration of the electric field, different molecular species can be separated from each other within a few milliseconds, more than 1,000 times faster than today's methods.
"Our initial tests used fragments of DNA – one with five base pairs, another with 16," said H. Kumar Wickramasinghe, IBM Fellow and co-developer of several different types of AFMs. "An electric field propelled these molecules down the 11.2-micron length of the AFM tip in 5 and 15 milliseconds, respectively. We controlled the passage of as few as 10 molecules, which indicates that this approach should be very useful for analyzing very small biological samples and in writing extremely small features."
It also has potential for delivering molecules onto a surface with great precision, which may be useful in creating future molecular electronic circuits or lithography features for more conventional nanoelectronics. To demonstrate the technique's initial deposition prowess, the scientists used a single tip to write an outline of IBM's classic 8-bar corporate logo in 59-79-nanometer-wide lines composed of 5-base-pair fragments of DNA. The logo was so small that more than 300 of them would fit on the cross section of a human hair.
"Our new method acts more like an inkjet printer than a fountain pen," Wickramasinghe said. "For example, we write only when the electric field is applied, not continuously while in contact with the surface. We can also control the deposition rate by varying the electric field strength, and our new technique is much less sensitive to the chemical properties of the molecules or the writing surface."
Is the origin of humor in pratfalls and flatulence?
“Witnessing another individual unexpectedly trip or slip (from an awkward bipedal gait?) while simultaneously recognising the non-seriousness of the mishap often elicits laughter in humans today,” says the study, which appears this week in the Quarterly Review of Biology. “Such a mishap could have become a potent elicitor of laughter in early hominids as a result of Pliocene pressures for increased social play.”
Someone's analyzed Pitchfork by the numbers, and it's a little surprising.
There’s no question that Pitchfork is probably the closest thing we’ve got these days to Rolling Stone — 1970s RS, that is — in terms of its influence over fans and artists and its pervasiveness in music-related media. Whether you agree or disagree with that influence is one thing, but it’s hard to deny that it exists. Record stores are increasingly basing the records they stock around the relative merit assigned to albums by Pitchfork, and concert attendence is following those very same trends. In this edition of The More You Know, we examine nearly 8500 reviews on Pitchfork dating back to 1996 to determine if Pitchfork itself is guilty of following trends, or at the very least, having tendencies.
As much as your gut would tell you otherwise, it’s hard to conclude that there’s a significant editorial bias to Pitchfork’s reviews after looking at these numbers. The average score of 6.45 suggests that Pitchfork is quite discriminating in their reviews and hesitant to hand out high scores — something you’ve probably realized if you’re an avid reader of the site. Additionally, the numbers show no clear bias towards particular artists on a site-wide level (though we’ve seen Mr. Josephes’ KISS fetish), and no significant tendency to give a specific grade over any other.
Melatonin can function as an anti-depressant, according to some new research, by shifting circadian rhythms.
Lewy and his colleagues in the OHSU Sleep and Mood Disorders Lab set out to test the hypothesis that circadian physiological rhythms become misaligned with the sleep/wake cycle during the short days of winter, causing some people to become depressed. Usually these rhythms track to the later dawn in winter, resulting in a circadian phase delay with respect to sleep similar to what happens flying westward. Some people appear to be tracking to the earlier dusk of winter, causing a similar amount of misalignment but in the phase-advance direction. Symptom severity in SAD patients correlated with the misalignment in either direction.
The treatment of choice for most SAD patients is bright light exposure, which causes phase advances when scheduled in the morning. Because patients know when they are exposed to bright light, however, there is a considerable placebo response associated with it. Melatonin can also cause phase advances, but it has to be taken in the afternoon. The Lewy team used afternoon melatonin to test if it was more antidepressant than melatonin taken in the morning, which causes phase delays.
The researchers randomly assigned 68 SAD patients to one of three treatment groups, taking placebo capsules or melatonin in the morning or afternoon for three weeks. After four years of study, they concluded that, similar to persistent jet lag, circadian misalignment is a major part of SAD.
Most patients, typically phase-delayed types or "night owls," have misalignment that responded best to taking low-dose melatonin in the afternoon or evening. A longer-than-expected subgroup of SAD patients, phase-advanced types or "morning larks," responded best to taking low-dose melatonin in the morning. Melatonin did not cause drowsiness, because the doses used were lower than what is usually taken at bedtime.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 01, 2006
"Oh, Nancy! The Superpan is not magical, it will burn you. You shouldn't listen to crowds and you shouldn't listen to pans."
The MacBook Pro suffers from the over-enthusiastic application of thermal grease, leading to over-heating issues. via
What have we learned, kids?
It just takes a slight misapplication of thermal grease on a MacBook Pro to make the temperatures skyrocket. After reapplying thermal grease properly, the fans actually turn on and keep the system much cooler.
Reflection.js lets you easily add "reflections" to images on the web, to make them look a little bit like video conferences in iChat AV.
I thought this AP piece on Mac security was just hilariously clueless:
With new Macs running the same processor that powers Windows-based machines, far more people will know how to exploit weaknesses in Apple machines than in the past, when they ran on the PowerPC chips made by IBM Corp. and Motorola Corp. spinoff Freescale Semiconductor Inc.
But it turns out x86 chips are vulnerable to exploits.
When the processor begins to overheat or encounters other conditions that could threaten the motherboard, the computer interrupts its normal operation, momentarily freezes and stores its activity, said Loïc Duflot, a computer security specialist for the French government’s Secretary General for National Defense information technology laboratory.
Cyberattackers can take over a computer by appropriating that safeguard to make the machine interrupt operations and enter System Management Mode, Duflot said. Attackers then enter the System Management RAM and replace the default emergency-response software with custom software that, when run, will give them full administrative privileges.
The Santorini/Thera volcanic blast took place a century earlier than previously thought, which means Bronze Age Mediterranean history will have to be rewritten.
"Santorini is the Pompeii of the prehistoric Aegean, a time capsule and a marker horizon," said Manning. "If you could date it, then you could define a whole century of archaeological work and stitch together an absolute timeline."
In pursuit of this time stamp, Manning and colleagues analyzed 127 radiocarbon measurements from short-lived samples, including tree-ring fractions and harvested seeds that were collected in Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Turkey. Those analyses, coupled with a complex statistical analysis, allowed Manning to assign precise calendar dates to the cultural phases in the Late Bronze Age.
"At the moment, the radiocarbon method is the only direct way of dating the eruption and the associated archaeology," said Manning, who puts Santorini's eruption in or just after the range 1660 to 1613 B.C. This date contradicts conventional estimates that linked Aegean styles in trade goods found in Egypt and the Near East to Egyptian inscriptions and records, which have long placed the event at around 1500 B.C.
To resolve the discrepancy, Manning suggests realigning the Aegean and Egyptian chronologies for the period 1700-1400 B.C. Parts of the existing archaeological chronology are strong and parts are weak, Manning noted, and the radiocarbon now calls for "a critical rethinking of hypotheses that have stood for nearly a century in the mid second millennium B.C."
Aegean and Near Eastern cultures, including the Minoan, Mycenaean and Anatolian civilizations, are fundamental building blocks for Greek and European early history. The new findings stretch Aegean chronology by 100 years, a move that could mean alliances and intercultural influences that were previously thought improbable.
The new results were bolstered by a dendrochronology and radiocarbon study, led by Danish geologist Walter Friedrich and published in the same issue of Science, which dated an olive branch severed during the Santorini eruption and arrived independently at a late 17th century B.C. dating.
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