« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »
June 30, 2006
"You are a little dubious as to the veracity of the claims of this shifty, grinning merchant trying to sell you bottles of Auroran Drop Bear repellant [sic]."
Well, I haven't been able to get any emulators running on my Nintendo DS yet, I was able to install DSLinux today. Telnetting to and fro my uber-GameBoy is gratifying on a deeply geeky level. Also, Tux looks really cute wearing the Mario beret.
Tomorrow, I'll get the DropBear SSH client for the DS working.
I might also install Mathomatic, a command-line calculating tool.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:00 PM | TrackBack
June 29, 2006
"A democracy of touch"
I was going to post another part of that video streaming tutorial tonight, but it's still a little rough around the edges. I was going to post about public/private key exchanges, but I never got past research. I was going to post on the momentous SCOTUS occasion, but ran out of time for reading, because, see, there's another reason too...
Today my Max Media Dock arrived. This nifty device lets you load a CompactFlash card or MicroDrive into a Nintendo DS and run unsigned code, play MP3s or low rez videos, etc. It's got a USB port built in, so you just attach it to a computer, which recognizes it as a memory card, load on some data, and slide it into the DS.
I'm going to get MoonShell working for multimedia stuff.
I tried installing DSChess but it crashed on launch.
I updated the Max Media Driver and now it plays MP3s natively in the filesystem, which is pretty slick.
I've got ScummVM DS installed, but I still have to scrounge for some games.
Tomorrow, I'll be installing more emulators for the original GameBoy and NES.
Oh yeah, and Max Overload is a hacked driver that'll let me run patched ROMs of DS games...backups of ROMs I own, of course...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:02 PM | TrackBack
June 28, 2006
"What about that time I found you naked with that bowl of Jello?" "You did not!" "This is true." "I was hot and I was hungry."
A geeky gem of a comment overheard at a payphone: via
"Yes, yes, that's right. You've got it. Now, here's what I want you to type. 'are em' ... yes. The letter 'r' and the letter 'm', together. Now type a dash. Yes, like a hyphen. OK, and then another 'r'. Yes rm space hyphen r. OK, now another space and then a star. Shift 8. Yes. Now read it back to me. [pause] OK perfect. Hit return and tell me what happens. [pause] [pause] OK. Thank you. Goodbye."
Amazing tutorial step-by-steps through the creation of a photo-realistic image in Photoshop with nothing but a mouse. via
Real grenadine—made from pomegranate, not corn syrup and red dye. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:51 PM | TrackBack
June 27, 2006
~O so old! / Thousands of years, thousands of years, / If all were told.~
Tonight, more Wikipedia research of Irish mythology for that creative writing project...
The tale of Urashima Tarō:
He spends many days in happiness at this underwater kingdom, however soon becomes homesick and asks to be allowed home. The queen of the palace allows him to go home and gives him as a gift a jewel encrusted box. Upon arriving home Urashima discovers that over 300 years have passed in the real world and no one can remember him or any of his contemporaries. Wallowing in with alleged propertdepression he heads to the beach and remembers the box he was given. He opens it and a white cloud is released and he suddenly ages and dies - the box having contained his true age. Variants of this story have developed throughout Oceania and the actual origin is unknown.
Similar stories also exist in Europe, the most famous being the conclusion of the Irish legend cycle of the Fianna, in which the bard Oisín is taken to Tír na nÓg. The Voyage of Bran is also similar to this story. A Japanese sci-fi author, Aritsune Toyoda, explained the story of Urashima by the Twin paradox derived from Albert Einstein's relativity.
The Mythological Cycle is the cycle of Irish mythology that's soooooo chock-full of mythology that they had to include it in the name.
The Mythological Cycle is one of the four major cycles of Irish mythology, and is so called because it represents the remains of the pagan mythology of pre-Christian Ireland, although the gods and supernatural beings have been euhemerised by their Christian redactors into historical kings and heroes. Occasionally though, the mask slips.
The Fomorians, who appear to be the Irish gods of chaos, are unique among the peoples of the Mythological Cycle in that they have no origin - they're just there.
The Fir Bolg were displaced by the Tuatha Dé Danann or "Peoples of the goddess Danu", descendants of Nemed, who either came to Ireland from the north on dark clouds or burnt their ships on the shore to ensure they wouldn't retreat. They defeated the Fir Bolg king, Eochaid mac Eirc, in the first Battle of Magh Tuiredh, but their own king, Nuada, lost an arm in the battle. As he was no longer physically perfect he lost the kingship, and his replacement, the half-Fomorian Bres, became the first Tuatha Dé High King of Ireland.
Bres turned out to be a tyrant and brought the Tuatha Dé under the oppression of the Fomorians. Eventually Nuada was restored to the kingship, having had his arm replaced by a working one of silver, and the Tuatha Dé rose against the Fomorians in the second Battle of Magh Tuiredh. Nuada was killed by the Fomorian king, Balor, but Balor met his prophesied end at the hands of his grandson, Lug, who became king of the Tuatha Dé.
The Tuatha Dé are undoubtedly degraded gods, and have many parallels across the Celtic world. Nuada is cognate with the British god Nodens; Lug is a reflex of the pan-Celtic deity Lugus; the name of Lug's successor, the Dagda, is explained by the Irish texts as "the good god"; Tuireann is related to the Gaulish Taranis; Ogma to Ogmios; the Badb to Catubodua. Even after they are displaced as the rulers of Ireland, characters such as Lug, the Mórrígan, Aengus and Manannan appear in stories set centuries later, showing all the signs of immortality.
The Tuatha Dé are said to have brought chariots and druidry to Ireland.
In Irish mythology, the Fomorians, Fomors, or Fomori (Irish Fomóiri, Fomóraig) were a semi-divine race who inhabited Ireland in ancient times. They may have once been believed to be the beings who preceded the gods, similar to the Greek Titans. It has been suggested that they represent the gods of chaos and wild nature, as opposed to the Tuatha Dé Danann who represent the gods of human civilization. Alternatively, they may represent the gods of the displaced pre-Goidelic population of Ireland.
They are sometimes said to have had the body of a man and the head of a goat, according to an 11th century text in Lebor na hUidre (the Book of the Dun Cow), or to have had one eye, one arm and one leg, but some, for example Elatha, the father of Bres, were very beautiful. Bres himself, for example, carries the epithet "the Beautiful."
However Bres turned out to be a bad king who forced the Tuatha Dé to work as slaves and pay tribute to the Fomorians. He lost authority when he was satirized for neglecting his kingly duties of hospitality. Nuada was restored to the kingship after his arm was replaced with a working one of silver, but the Tuatha Dé's oppression by the Fomorians continued.
Bres fled to his father, Elatha, and asked for his help to restore him to the kingship. Elatha refused, on the grounds that he should not seek to gain by foul means what he couldn't keep by fair. Bres instead turned to Balor, a more warlike Fomorian chief living on Tory Island, and raised an army.
The Tuatha Dé also prepared for war, under another half-Fomorian leader, Lug. His father was Cian of the Tuatha Dé, and his mother was Balor's daughter Ethniu. This is presented as a dynastic marriage in early texts, but folklore preserves a more elaborate story, reminiscent the story of Zeus and Cronus from Greek mythology. Balor, who had been given a prophesy that he would be killed by his own grandson, locked Ethniu in a glass tower to keep her away from men. But when he stole Cian's magical cow, Cian got his revenge by gaining entry to the tower, with the help of a druidess called Biróg, and seducing her. She gave birth to triplets, which Balor ordered drowned. Two of the babies either died or turned into the first seals, but Biróg saved one, Lug, and gave him to Manannan and Tailtiu to foster. As an adult Lug gained entry to Nuada's court through his mastery of every art, and was given command over the army.
The Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians are closely related. Neit, a war god, is an ancestor of both.
The word fomóire is believed to derive from Old Irish fo muire (Modern Irish faoi muire), "under the sea". This, combined with their association with glass towers in the western ocean, suggests a connection with icebergs. However the mór element may derive from a word meaning "terror" which survives in English "nightmare".
They are the remnants of the underground kingdom given to the Tuatha Dé Danann ("people of the Goddess Danu") after they were defeated by the Milesians. According to the Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions), the Tuatha Dé Danann (also "Daoine Sídhe"), were defeated in battle by the mortal Sons of Míl Espáine. As part of the surrender terms the Túatha Dé Danann agreed to dwell underground in the síde (singular síd), the hills or mounds that dot the Irish landscape.
The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danann:
From Falias was brought the Stone of Fal (Lia Fáil), The Stone of Destiny which was supposedly located near the Hill of Tara in County Meath. It used to cry out beneath every king of Ireland. Said to hold Ireland above the waves. The Druid who lived in Falias was named Morfessa. From Gorias was brought the Spear of Destiny (Spear Luin). The Druid who lived in Gorias was named Esras. It was forged by the Smith of Falias for Lugh to use in his fight against Balor. No battle was ever sustained against it, or against the man who held it. From Findias was brought the sword of Nuada (Claíomh Solais). The Druid who lived in Findias was named Uscias. No one ever escaped from it once it was drawn from its deadly sheath, and no one could resist it. A bronze sword in the National Museum in Dublin claims to be this sword. From Murias was brought The Dagda’s Cauldron, the Coire Anseasc ("Undry Cauldron"). Semias was the Druid who lived in Murias. The cauldron was bottomless, capable of feeding an army. No company ever went away from it unsatisfied.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:08 PM | TrackBack
June 26, 2006
"In pools among the rushes / That scarce could bathe a star"
These links, like yesterday's, are research for a long-term creative writing project.
Despite the motif of Morgan's enmity towards Arthur and Guinevere, she is also presented as one of the women who takes Arthur in a barge to Avalon to be healed. This view of Morgan as healer has its roots in the earliest accounts of her and perhaps to her origin in Celtic mythology. In the Vita Merlini (c. 1150) Morgan is said to be the first of nine sisters who rule The Fortunate Isle or the Isle of Apples and is presented as a healer as well as a shape-changer. It is to this island that Arthur is brought (though Morgan awaits him and heals him rather than actually fetching him herself). Morgan proclaims that she can heal Arthur if he stays with her for a long time.
Wikipedia on Morgana:
The character first appears as "Morgen" in the 12th century Latin Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, where she is the first of nine sisters who rule Avalon, The Fortunate Isle or the Isle of Apples (cf. Garden of the Hesperides), where in fact she is the sole sister with a definite presence. Geoffrey presents her as a typical fay, a healer and even a shapeshifter. In early tales she is generally a benevolent presence; her healing ointment is used to cure the hero in Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, the Knight of the Lion). In Geoffrey's earlier Historia Regum Britanniae he claimed Arthur had sailed off to Avalon after receiving mortal wounds at the Battle of Camlann; later authors link Morgan to this event. Even the authors of the prose romances, who typically use Morgan as a villain, maintain her benevolence in this case.
The Welsh Triads preserve an interesting story about the birth of Owain mab Urien (Ywain), known in later writings as the son of Morgan. King Urien finds a beautiful fairy woman standing in a ford, bound to wash clothes there until she conceives a child by a Christian king. He has his way with her, and returns a year later to find his infant children, Owain and his twin sister Morvydd. The woman was Modron, a figure known elsewhere as a Welsh goddess whose father (Avalloc) is king of an otherworld very much like Avalon. This may represent a link between the Arthurian Morgan and authentic Welsh tradition, but it must be noted that Morgan appears alongside Urien and Ywain in the French romances for decades before a familial connection was made, and that the Triads' manuscripts date well after this association had been established in French.
While frequently assumed to be related to the Irish war goddess the Morrigan because of their similar names, Arthurian scholars agree that she is more likely descended from Modron, a mother goddess of Celtic myth, and the strong fay tradition among the Celts. A group of Breton water fairies is called the Morganes.
Modern interpretations of the Arthurian myth sometimes assign to Morgan the role of seducing Arthur and giving birth to the wicked Mordred, though originally (as in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur) it was Morgause who did this.
Wikipedia on changelings:
In Wales the changeling child (plentyn newid) initially resembles the human it substitutes, but gradually grows uglier in appearance and behaviour: ill-featured, malformed, ill-tempered, given to screaming and biting. It may be of less than usual intelligence, but again is identified by its more than childlike wisdom and cunning.
The common means employed to identify a changeling is to cook a family meal in an eggshell. The child will exclaim, "I have seen the acorn before the oak, but I never saw the likes of this," and vanish, only to be replaced by the original human child. Alternatively, or following this identification, it is necessary to mistreat the child by placing it in a hot oven, by holding it in a shovel over a hot fire, or by bathing it in a solution of foxglove.
It has been hypothesized that the changeling legend may have developed, or at least been used to, explain the peculiarities of children who did not develop normally, probably including all sorts of developmental delays and abnormalities. In particular, it has been suggested that children with autism would be likely to be labeled as changelings or elf-children due to their strange, sometimes inexplicable behavior. This has found a place in autistic culture. Some high-functioning autistic adults have come to identify with changelings (or other replacements, such as aliens) for this reason and their own feeling of being in a world where they don’t belong and of practically not being the same species as the "normal" people around them.
Wikipedia on The Voyage of Bran:
In Irish Mythology, Bran, son of Febal, embarks upon a quest to the Other World. One day while Bran is walking, he hears beautiful music, so beautiful, in fact, that it lulls him to sleep. Upon awakening, he sees a beautiful silver branch in front of him. He returns to his royal house, and while his company is there, a strange woman appears, and sings to him a poem about the land where the branch had grown. In this Otherworld, it is always summer, there is no want of food or water, and no sickness or despair ever touches the perfect people. She tells Bran to voyage to the Land of Women across the sea, and the next day he gathers a company of men to do so.
After two days, he sees a man on a chariot speeding towards him. The man is Manannan mac Lir, and he tells Bran that he is not sailing upon the ocean, but upon a flowery plain. He also reveals to Bran that there are many men riding in chariots, but that they are invisible.
All the people upon the Isle of Joy laugh and stare at him, but will not answer his calls. When Bran sends a man ashore to see what the matter is, the man starts to laugh and gape just like the others.
For one whole year, although it seemed like many more, the men feasted happily in the Land of Women until Nechtan Mac Collbran felt homesickness stir within him. The leader of the women was reluctant to let them go, and warned them not to step upon the shores of Ireland.
Bran and his company sailed back to Ireland. The people that had gathered on the shores to meet him did not recognize his name except in their legends. Nechtan Mac Collbran, upset, jumped off the boat onto the land. Immediately, Nechtan Mac Collbran turned to ashes.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:37 PM | TrackBack
June 25, 2006
~Putting all reason aside you exchange / What you got for a thing that's hypnotic and strange~
Number spirals, with many pretty diagrams and mind-blowing visual math:
Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center.
The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side.
It looks as though primes tend to concentrate in certain curves that swoop away to the northwest and southwest, like the curve marked by the blue arrow. (The numbers on that curve are of the form x(x+1) + 41, the famous prime-generating formula discovered by Euler in 1774.)
It turns out that every integer on a product curve is intersected by a second related curve.
The existence of the second curve is a consequence of the following property of offset curves in general: the product of any two adjacent integers on a curve can be found further out on that curve at a distance from the first factor which is equal to the first factor's value.
Here's an example:
4 5 8 13 20 29 40 53...
We can regard the first pair of integers, 4 and 5, as the factors "4 x 5." To find their product, count "0, 1, 2, 3, 4" starting with the 4. You land on 20.
Try again with the second pair, "5 x 8." Count from 0 to 5 starting with the 5, and you land on 40.
This works with every pair of integers on every offset curve on the spiral.
As a consequence of this, every integer on a product curve is intersected by a second curve that has the factors explicitly present on it. The intersection of the two curves is like a visual statement of the multiplication: the product lies on one curve and the factors lie on the other.
The product in this example is 24. The blue product curve is S–1, indicating a difference of 2, so the factors are 4 x 6. Those factors appear in order on the red factor curve. Counting up from 4 on the red curve (starting with zero), we arrive on the count of 4 at 24 on the blue curve. It all works out neatly.
But that's not all. There is a relationship between the adjacent integers on one curve and the adjacent integers on the other. On one curve those numbers are 15 and 35; on the other, 16 and 34. The difference between corresponding numbers is one.
The intersection of the two curves seems to contain a great deal of information in geometric form about the factorization.
Nice collection of myths about Arianrhod, Lady of the White Book, Keeper of the Spiral Castle:
Arianrhod appears in the Mabinogion, known originally as the White Book of the Rhydderch, as the sister of Gwydion ap Math ap Mathonwy. (Matthews: 25) They are both the children of Don (ibid.) The story says that when Math lost his footholder, it was Gwydion who elected to have his sister taker her place. (ibid.) The footholder of Math was supposed to be chaste, and so Arianrhod was put to the test. (ibid.) The test consisted of her having to step over the wand of Math. When she did so, she prematurely gave birth to twin sons: Lleu and Dylan. (ibid.)
After Arianrhod gave birth to the twins, Dylan and Lleu, Dylan is said to have been drowned. In some local stories, it is either Math or Arianrhod who throws Dylan into the sea. (Coulter and Turner: 68) In the Mabinogion, it states that, "He took on its nature, and swam as well as the best fish that was therein." Moreover, for that reason he was called Dylan, meaning "Son of the Wave." (Spence: 27) It was said that beneath him no wave ever broke. Another legend states that Dylan was killed from a spear by his uncle Gobhan, and that the waves of the surrounding lands wept for him. (ibid.) The sound of the sea running up the Conway River is still called, "Dylan's Death Groan." (ibid.) This story appears to be very reminiscent of the slaying of the Irish goddess Brigit's son, Ruadan, who was killed by a single blow from his uncle Gobhan's spear. Near Glynllifon, a place that has local folklore concerning Arianrhod, there is a place refereed to by the men who love there as Pwynt Maen Dylan. (Rhys: 210)
Medrawd can be connected to the Irish Ruadan or the earlier Welsh Dylan. According to Rolleston in his book, "Celtic Myths and Legends," he specifically shows Medrawt as being the equivalent of Dylan and Later becoming Sir Mordred of Arthurian legend. (Rolleston: 352) In the Annales Cambriae, Medrawd is said to have died at Camlon in 539 AD.
Caer Arianrhod is the name given to the Corona Borealis and to the sea-laved castle of the same name which is said to be located near the pre-historic mound of Dinas Dinlle near the Menai Straits. (Rhys: 645)
The reef or submerged rock, off the west coast of Arvon is often referred to as Caer Arianrhod. (Spencer: 27) John Rhys suggests that Arianrhod may have been a water faerie who lived in a water-girt castle. (ibid.) It is suggested by Lhuyd that this submerged rock may have been referred to as Caer Arianrhod since the period of the Mabinogion itself. (ibid.) Modernly, Caer Arianrhod is referred to as Caranthreg. (Rhys: 207)
Arianrhod means "silver circle" and may be a reference to the flow of the sea around the submerged rock. (Spence: 27) The Welsh Triads refer to Arianrhod by saying, "Round her flows the River Efnys." (ibid.)
In Llangefni, near Anglesey, there are stories about women who came from Tregar Anthreg to Caer Loda to fetch food or water, and looking back, they saw a town which had been flooded by the sea and that the walls could still be seen at low water. (Rhys: 207) One of the women was called Gwennan, and she was buried at Bed Gwennan. (ibid.) Tregar Anthreg can easily be witnessed from Dinas Dinlle as a rock in the water that is located not too far from the shore. (ibid.)
Another variation of the same story relates how three sisters by the names of Gwen, Elan, and Maelan came from Tregan Anhreg to gather provisions and while they were gone their own city was consumed by the sea. (Rhys: 208) Gwen ran to Bed Gwennan. Maelan fled to Rhos Maelan, otherwise known as Maelon's Moor. Elan went to Tydyn Elan which is also called Elan's Holding. All of these locations are names of places in the nearby area of Anglesey. (ibid.) In the area of Glynllifon, the same story is told, but the title of bi don is attached to the end of each of the three sister's names. (ibid.) Bi don appears to be a late period method of saying "child of Donn." (Rhys: 210)
Within the area surrounding Glynllifon, the place identified as Caer Arianrhod was though to be a place of wickedness. For this reason, only Arianrhod's sisters were permitted to escape. (Rhys: 209) Arianrhod was believed to have drowned, but there was no reason for her death ever supplied in the local stories.(ibid.)
Lhuyd suggests that Arianrhod became the Arthuran Argentem or Queen of Avalon, who is referred to elsewhere as Morgan le Fee' and described by Layamon, and early English poet. (Spence: 27)
In Brittany, the term morgan is used to refer to a mermaid. (Spence: 28) Welsh morgans are lake faeries who have a love for deep water. (Tongue: 26) In some parts of Wales, the morgan is said to kidnap children. (Spence: 28)
Within Welsh culture, the significance and view of lakes and the sea are the same, and so the morgan is a water faerie who can easily be found in either location. (Tongue: 28) Morgan, or Morgen, and the older form of the word Morien, means "sea-born" or "offspring of the sea." (Rhys: 373) It is directly related to the Irish Muirgen which was an epithet for a lake lady in Ireland by the name of Liban. (ibid.) The story of Liban relates how she was neglectful in the covering of a well and consequently the waters rushed forth and became Lough Neagh. (ibid.) Liban did not die, but rather made her home beneath the lake until she changed into a salmon. (ibid.) Morgan is also the name of the lady of the lake who cares for Arthur at her home in Avalon. She is also the half-sister of Arthur. (Rhys: 374)
I found a copy of "Donald in Mathmagic Land" on YouTube...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:42 PM | TrackBack
June 24, 2006
"Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth."
When they glom onto a scaffold of carbon nanodots that also act as electrodes for measurement, rat brain cells organize into crystalline grids.
A team led by Yael Hanein of Tel Aviv University in Israel used 100-micrometre-wide bundles of nanotubes to coax rat neurons into forming regular patterns on a sheet of quartz.
The neurons cannot stick to the quartz surface but do bind to the nanotube dots, in clusters of about between 20 and 100. Once attached, these neuron bundles are just the right distance from one another to stretch out projections called axons and dendrites to make links with other clusters nearby.
The electrical activity of the neural network can easily be measured because carbon nanotubes conduct electricity and so can function as electrodes.
The process makes it possible to create more uniform neural networks, Hanein says. In experiments they last longer than other artificial networks, surviving for up to 11 weeks. This could be crucial for building biosensors using the cells, she claims.
That's all for today...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:02 PM | TrackBack
June 23, 2006
"By-and-by there's the travelling doctor gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth; / Or the Pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath."
ShieldZone sells protective films for the iPod, DS, cell phones, etc. But these films are a little different... via
The invisibleSHIELD is the toughest, most durable screen protector on planet earth. It is made from a film originally created by the military to protect the leading edges of helicopter blades from wear and tear while traveling hundreds of miles per hour!
From a comment on Jamie Zawinski's blog:
Even though Gilette makes some of the best razors out there, I don't buy from them because they used to test on animals until recently. I don't buy products from Microsoft because they test their products on end users.
The other day, on MetaFilter, klangklangston got fed up with a self-righteous, technologically ignorant commenter who wanted to criminalize and morally impugn anyone who used an open WiFi spot. He was so frustrated, he turned to craft "Internet snark as cruel surrealist theater," in the words of another user. It made me laugh.
God, Twiggy, you're like the Idiot Pope, boldly offering pronouncements based on a defense of the ignorant when you only really have any authority if we've already accepted your moronic first premises. How's that for an analogy?
"If you do not know which one it is, then how can you say it's completely ethical and fine to assume this person wants you to use it, and go ahead and do so?"
Asked and answered counselor.
The Router and the Laptop; A Passion Play
Router— Hey, hey, hey, Laptop! I'm open! You can use me! Totally cool!
Laptop— Ok. Jesus, it's the internet! Awesome!
Twiggy, dressed as Abadea— But how shall we know that the Router acted not with the wishes of the Owner? We can assume nothing, for all men are fools!
Punch (beats Twiggy with stick)— That's the way to do it!
Twiggy— But, but, but... People don't read manuals. Also, I am sympathetic to the gamboling idiocy of the masses for reasons I cannot disclose! Also, TOS is, like, almost law!
Chorus— Twiggy, though you spin and spin, you've yet to argue out of anything other than a general disdain for computer users and several tortured analogies. It's time to admit that you were grandstanding on a largely unrelated point and move onto something else, like circumcision. Else you will be doomed to die, spouting the same retarded blather.
CURTAIN.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:40 PM | TrackBack
June 22, 2006
"I don't mean to offend, but this tastes like vomit!" "Thank you." "No actually, I did mean to offend a little. This is awful!"
Nasty headaches preclude lengthy posts...
Backlit Keyboard CPU Load Monitor for PowerBooks and MacBook Pros via
This time I think it's for real: Futurama resurrected, 13 new eps to air on...Comedy Central? via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:56 PM | TrackBack
June 21, 2006
"The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them."
I was busy tonight backing up my laptop with SuperDuper, the superior Mac OS X backup utility.
No links. Sorry =(
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:41 PM | TrackBack
June 20, 2006
"They've encased him in Carbonite. He should be quite well protected. If he survived the freezing process, that is."
A new tracer that targets CB1 receptors in the brain but does not activate them will finally allow positron imaging of the parts of the brain stimulated by cannabis and the endocannabinoids.
Other such tracers exist for a myriad of brain receptors, including ones for opiates and serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in depression. But creating an analogous molecule for cannabinoid receptors has been a challenge. Tracers are injected into a patient's bloodstream, where they travel to the brain and compete with naturally occurring chemicals for binding sites on the target receptors. But cannabinoid-like molecules are fat-soluble, meaning they're attracted to the lipid membranes of cells, and have trouble crossing the blood-brain barrier. (THC, the main active compound in marijuana, is an exception.) But Horti was able to design a molecule that could cross the blood-brain barrier and was highly specific to the CB1 receptor.
There's a SNES emulator for the DS now.
Amorphous carbonia is carbon dioxide glass.
Under extremely high pressures of up to half a million atmospheres, molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2) form a glassy crystalline solid, they found.
At present, a-CO2 is a curiosity because it cannot be tested or used outside the pressure chamber. The CO2 that in these extraordinary conditions takes up a chaotic "amorphous" structure, becoming glass, reverts to orderly molecules of CO2 under decompression.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:25 PM | TrackBack
June 19, 2006
"A mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it."
Body of publisher, friend of Cheney, recovered from Chesapeake Bay via
ShadowBook lets you change virtual desktops by waving your hand over the light sensors on PowerBooks and MacBooks Pro (MacBook Pros? I never know. It's like with the iPod mini. What's the plural? iPods mini, or iPod minis? Personally, I think it should work like the plural of attorney general (attorneys general) just because it sounds cool and is so rarely used...). via
The guy behind ShadowBook also recommends that developers explore the undocumented CGSSetWindowWarp function in the OS X API, which could allow all sorts of cool stuff:
• 3D Exposé replacement: "rotate" the screen, so can you can see windows from the side and pick one out
• Fish-eye window manager: keep full-sized windows in the center of the screen; shrink and warp when they reach the edge
• Rotational virtual desktops: something similar to the FrontRow menu, where the windows would be on the outside of a cylinder. You could zoom out slightly, then spin the cylinder to get to the windws you want.
• Wobbly windows: pretend that the windows are only pinned to the desktop at the top, and use the motion sensor and some simple physics to wobble the windows.
The Nintendo DS was inspired by the old Nintendo Game&Watch handheld systems, which had two very simple LCD screens in a clamshell design. Nostalgia for my old Game&Watch was one of the reasons I bought a DS. Now, Nintendo plans to release a Game&Watch compilation for the DS.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:32 PM | TrackBack
June 18, 2006
"By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood."
I'm glad I got the 2.3 GHz model; some liquid-cooled PowerMac G5s are leaking. That possibility really was something I considered when I decided to go with the slower, air-cooled model.
I decided to do some more research and found a guy that had a unit 14 months old that leaked. He did not have AppleCare, but Apple agreed to fix it because it was less than 90-days out of warranty. A few months later, he had another unit leak. This time, the globs of glowing green goo got into his power supply and shorted it out. One of his co-workers described a bright flash and a loud buzzing crackle. Light-colored smoke poured out of the machine, and sizzling coolant dripped onto the aluminum handle. The “cheese grater” back grill had scorch marks. With both incidents, he said Apple was extremely cooperative and provided swift resolution by paying for the parts and labor required to restore the G5s back to working condition. He also noted that he did not lose any data on either machine.
So what’s going on here? It seems that the early 2.5 GHz liquid-cooled G5s shipped with Delphi radiators that were problematic. That may have been the reason Apple delayed shipment for three months after the liquid-cooled G5s were introduced. Apparently Apple may have been having problems with them from the beginning.
Time travel: best practices for thorough frauds.
Every moment people devote to arguing an obscure part of your story is a moment they're not thinking "wait a minute, why should I believe that a bozo on the Internet is a time traveller?". Be sure to pepper your story with verifiable details to help establish your credibility. If possible, allude to things in passing, so readers can do their own sleuth work and create an illusion of corroborated evidence.
Here again John Titor leads by example. To take one example, he alludes to a "problem with Unix in 2038", which a little investigation will show is real. All Unix clocks on 32-bit architectures roll over in 2038, when the number of seconds since 1970 (Year One for all Unix clocks) exceeds 2^32. Some of us estimate that this Y2K38 problem will cause global devastation of the same magnitude as Y2K.
Entire megabytes of Titor discussion thread are devoted to parsing out the plausibility of the Unix motive - is an ancient IBM computer really so hard to emulate in 2036? Is Titor lying about the real reason for his return? People get so caught up in the fine points that they forget to question the original premise. And someone out there is bound to think "This Unix thing checks out - so he MUST be telling the truth!".
Don't skimp on the details!
That's all for tonight. And, for some reason, I can't figure out where I found either of those links, so there are no [via] citations...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:47 PM | TrackBack
June 17, 2006
"Although they have them in their own lands, they do not labour to obtain them, nor do they value them."
In addition to explaining how the old device worked, the NES Light Zapper FAQ also predicts the Wiimote:
Next comes the 'modern' light guns,
They can sense the position of the white sprites relitive to
their feild of view. This is why they have the larger barrels. This is also
why they must be calabrated. I suppose this new methode could be combined
with the old methode to produce some amazing games where the game could
know the distance, position, and angle of the gun from the screen. This
could be used to make very realistic 3D shooting games where distace to
taget accually had reallistic effects like gravity, vicosity and wind (not
just the size of the enemy graphic). This would dicourage players from
putting the gun against the screen, they'd only gain at most 25 feet closer
to your oponet, since the game knows where the gun is it could just
electronically move everything back 25 feet. Add another device, a box
sitting on top of the TV, and a reciever the player wears and enemies in
the game could accually shoot back (electronically of course) forcing the
player to run around the room, dive behing the couch and so one. This
also, would discourage the player from walking right up and putting the gun
on the screen. And of couse the ultimate would be to add 3D glasses, you
could watch the illusion of a vapor trail shoot from the barrel of your
light gun into the screen then continue the target. So what does the
sensor on top of the TV do you ask. Well it basically just becomes a pain
in the ass! It's a plain vannilla run-of-the-mill infa-red reciever, JUST
LIKE ANY OTHER WIRELESS CONTROLLER. The benefits of these IR recievers
include interference, blocked reception, two extra lenses to get dirty,
data delay and data loss, any of these can happen just at the right moment
to ***** you and messup your game. Believe me, the wire hanging of the
Zapper is far better setup. Of course 'the ultimate 3D gun game' I
described above could not be done with a wire, neither would an IR reciever
work reliable with the players running around the room. A 900mhz reciver
would work best. I'm not sure the FCC allows the use of 900mhz for 'toys'
however. I think it's only authorised for voice transmission with
restrictions on that too.
The etymology of America is fitting.
It is ostensibly named after Amerigo Vespucci, who was one of the first to suggest that the New World was actually a continent of it’s own. But why name it after him just because of that? Perhaps this line from the etymological dictionary sheds some light on the subject: “The name Amerigo is Gmc. [Germanic], said to derive from Goth[ic]. Amalrich, lit[erally]. ‘work-ruler.’” An online name dictionary offers this explanation of Amalric, which is pretty similar:
Derived from the Germanic elements amal “work, labour” and ric “power”.
So from the start, the very name of the continent and country has essentially meant “the power of labour” or “work as ruler.” You could perhaps extend this to the idea of democracy and the ability of the ordinary man, the worker, to have power both over his life and of the life of the nation. This somewhat esoteric reading also dovetails ever so perfectly into the so-called Protestant work ethic upon which this country is founded, and the American Dream, which Wikipedia defines as “the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity.”
And then of course there is the All-Seeing Eye of the Eye of Providence which rests atop an unfinished pyramid on the back of our dollar bill. Though various people suggest a connection to Masonic-conspiratorial imagery, we could extend our idea of the “power of labour” to this symbol as well. Since, you’ll recall, that pyramids were supposed to have been built by slave labor (Jews, the Bible tells us). So we have the Work-Ruler as the one(s) constructing the pyramid, overseen by “I Am the Ever Ruler” - the All-Seeing Eye, the “I AM THAT I AM” (”Ehyeh asher ehyeh” in Hebrew), the response God gave when Moses (of the former slave-caste) asked for His name. What we see is a symbolic union of the eternal “the ever ruler” within the field of “work” or of time…
Since we’re on the topic of Judaism and mysticism, we ought to also pull in the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun Olam, as put forward by Isaac Luria in the 1500’s (born only two decades after Amerigo Vespucci’s death). Tikkun Olam essentially means “world repair” and relates to the hard work that is required to bring the sparks of God trapped in the material world back to liberation and re-unification with God. Though the phrase today is more commonly referred to in the sense of social justice or taking steps to improve the condition of society, it’s mystical meanings are rather more interesting:
The “repair,” that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.
This in turn is reminiscent of the controversial (and possibly apocryphal) quote attributed to James G. Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Reagan in 1981, “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:09 PM | TrackBack
June 16, 2006
"We went through five Adams before we figured that out."
The other day, I was thinking that the world map for the New Super Mario Bros. game for the DS resembled the Tree of Life, or Sephirot, and that got me googling.
Some people see a broken tesseract in the Sephirot.
He mused the graphic over. "Very elegant. The sephiroth do resemble a broken hypercube. In Kabbalah, that is what is known as 'the Fall'."
"Yes, we've discussed this before. The lowest 3 sephirah of the middle column form a phallus that enters the vaginus of the other 7 -- the origins of what Crowley called 'sex magic'."
Then there's Metatron's Cube, from sacred geometry. Metatron's Cube contains the five platonic solids in one drawing, and to make it even cooler, it's calculated off of Phi, the golden ratio. Look hard enough and you can see it as a cube-within-a-cube with the pointed ends angled so they're head-on.
In the process of this googling, I found a resource called Psyche's Links: 15000++ Links to Esoteric Subjects on the Web, wherein I found the previous link and some other interesting things.
Bruce Rawles' Sacred Geometry Homepage has lots of good information, heavy on the geometry, light on the mumbo-jumbo.
And, of course, there's an indispensable MathWorld page on the hypercube.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:10 PM | TrackBack
June 15, 2006
"I was drinkin so much I forgot what life was about. Gold! Beautiful gold! Nuggets as big as your fists!"
In the spirit of "if something's worth doing, it's worth doing well," a college professor has cobbled together directions for how to cheat good.
There's gold under that thar mantle! The center of the earth has a high concentration of Au. Strangely, the story also puts a modern twist on the way the ancients thought planets influenced the growth of metals in the earth: via
"By looking at other stars that are currently at the state our Sun was in then, we can see that they are surrounded by a flattened disc of dust and gas," Wood says.
"We know that within about 10,000 years these formed into small bodies that were about 10 kilometres across."
Radioactive dating has shown that over the next 100,000 to one million years, those small "planetesimals" collided to form Moon-to-Mars sized planetary embryos.
Early in its history, the Earth was probably covered in a sea of molten rock, hundreds of kilometres deep.
During the planet's development, this "magma ocean" reacted with metals in the planetesimals, extracting many of the most important and interesting elements, including gold, and eventually depositing them in the Earth's own iron-rich core.
To calculate how much gold was in the Earth's core Wood compared the composition of the Earth's crust with that of meteorites, which can be used to represent planetesimals.
He and other researchers have found that the meteorites had similar levels of all elements that would not normally dissolve in iron.
But they also noted that meteorites had higher levels of elements such as gold, platinum and nickel.
"This tells us that the Earth is chemically very similar to those meteorites, but the Earth's crust is depleted in all those elements that like to dissolve in iron," Wood says.
There's only one place those elements can have gone - the molten core.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:19 PM | TrackBack
June 14, 2006
"At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you."
I was going to write about the Bush-and-the-blind-man story, but the Daily Show just went for it before my eyes. Suffice to say that Wonkette deserves major credit for, ahem, bringing this to light.
Yesterday I got a forwarded email with random geographic trivia, including this:
Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.
That surprised me. I thought Varanasi in India or Arbil in Iraq was the oldest. Wikipedia has a handy list of the oldest continually inhabited cities sorted by age, though, and it backs up the email. Damascus it is.
I know, I know, another short post. I have like dozens of browser windows open, but never seem to feel like writing them up...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:01 PM | TrackBack
June 13, 2006
"Old man Peabody owned all of this. He had this crazy idea about breeding pine trees."
This is so cool I'm going to make a post just for it. Or maybe I'm feeling lazy. You decide;P
In the Aymara language spoken in the Andes mountains, the past is ahead of you. Plus: trinary logic and linguistic empiricism. via
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
“Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world – from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on – have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model,” said Nunez.
A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the “language of Adam.” More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called “Andean logic” – which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no – to computer applications.
The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year.”
Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn’t command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.
“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” Nunez said. “That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn’t have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.
“But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.
Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.
A “simple” unqualified statement like “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is not possible in Aymara – the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.
In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen – and known/unknown – to such an extent as to weave “evidential” requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:44 PM | TrackBack
June 12, 2006
~The shining night is a sea of illumination~
I finished watching an anime series called Blue Seed last night. I'd picked it up on a whim in early spring, since the box set was priced to sell. I didn't know a damned thing about it. After reading some reviews on the web, I remained hesitant. It was supposed to start out being kind of childish, meander through an unbearable series of monster-of-the-week episodes, and then barrel around a bunch of crazy, dark plot twists in the final arc. That last bit sounded interesting, but I wasn't so sure if it was worth the beginning and middle bits. Anyway, I ran out of other stuff to watch and blazed through the series of 26 episodes in a week or two.
The basic plot premise is that animistic Shinto nature spirits are real, they're back, and they're pissed off. Since this is an anime, that means a bunch of giant monsters running rampant through the streets of Tokyo. The monsters are explained away as plants that have been mutated by a virus-like pathogen. The pathogen spreads from the titular blue seeds.
Thematically, the series has some interesting things to say about the interplay between science and spirituality. The nature spirits want to roll back the industrial revolution, but it never devolves into a bout between technology and religion. Instead, the series is more about reframing the sort of mysticism that's usually thought of as being anti-technology as, instead, existing within a framework of scientific knowledge...like the episode of Buffy when Willow accidentally scans a demon into the school's computer network.
Actually, there are a lot of similarities to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The protagonist is the Kushinada, a teenaged girl, fated to die, whose blood makes her the only person who can stop the monsters, and she's aided by a mysterious, part-monster boyfriend who appears out of nowhere, usually at just the right moment. Together, along with the help of a rag-tag team of fellow monster hunters who make up for their lack of supernatural powers through a combination of know-how, weaponry, and silly one-liners, they ostensibly fight back the random monster who appears at the start of every episode while focusing most of their attention on interpersonal relationships. Oh yeah, and there's even another teenaged girl whose blood would make her the only person who could stop the monsters...if she wasn't evil.
Like many literary works dealing with this kind of subject matter (see: Carnivale), Blue Seed delves into human sacrifice. Why? Human sacrifice is tied connected to crop fertility, which in turn is tied up in the history of science . Agriculture was one of the first disruptive technologies, and yet it brought with it ignorance and death as much as nurture and safety. But the escape from that kind of lunacy isn't to turn away from scientific thought, but going further with it until it becomes evident through careful observation and measurement that sacrifice does nothing for growing things.
So yeah. Science versus religion, man versus nature, emotion versus logic, faith versus reason, etc, etc, aren't dualisms fun? Anyway, Blue Seed is steeped in Japanese mythology, most of which flew waaaaay over my head when I was watching it.
Mainly, I was curious about the name of the protagonist's beau/bodyguard: Kusanagi. That's also the last name of the Major, the main character of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. So I checked it out on Wikipedia and hit a gold mine of relevant information about Blue Seed.
It seems Blue Seed is based on a legend from the Kojiki, the oldest recorded body of Japanese mythology. The monsters are the kami, the Shinto term for nature spirits. Their souls, or mitamas, are the blue seeds. The first monster that shows up in the series, Orochi, really was an eight-headed dragon as the series portrays him. Susanoo, the ambiguous villain of the series, was brother to the sun and moon, part of the triumvirate of Shinto mythology. In the story from the Kojiki, Susanoo comes down to earth to be a hero. He runs into this man who begs for help. An evil monster—Orochi—has demanded the sacrifice of 7 of the man's daughters, and is now ordering the death of his eighth and final daughter, Kushinada. Susanoo first extracts the girl's hand in marriage from her father, and then slays the dragon Orochi to rescue her. How does he fell the mighty beast? Sake. Really. I mean it. He gets the eight-headed serpent drunk. Seriously. Eight discombobulations later, inside of the dragon's tail, he finds the sword Kusanagi, grass-cutter (literally: "snake-sword").
The idea of a demi-god slaying a lower nature spirit who had demanded human sacrifice and instead taking the sacrifice as consort makes my Spidey-sense tingle. It reminds me of Abraham and Isaac, or Isis and Osiris, or how Prometheus tricked Zeus into taking offerings of charred bones instead of meat, in that it seems to be a subtle marking of some deep societal change. Blue Seed ties the above legend together with another Japanese myth about a many-headed dragon who demanded human sacrifices: the rite of Matsuri.
Kosui Matsuri {ko-sooy mah-tsu-re} or Lake Festival on July 31 night
In days of yore when Priest Mangan was the chief of the Shrine, there lived, according to legend, a dragon in the lake and he often afflicted people living near the lake. They had to offer human sacrifice, mostly young girls, to the dragon every year to appease his revengeful spirit. Hearing the story, the Priest made a stone stairs leading into the lake and exorcised the evil spirit of the dragon with his magical power. The dragon finally gave in and has never since afflicted the people. He is believed to have changed to Kuzuryu {koo-zoo-r'you} , literally a nine-headed dragon (like Hydra, but Priest Mangan did not slay him), and began to live in the lake as the guardian spirit. The festival takes place on the evening of July 31 every year near the Torii gate of the Shrine. The chief priest get on a boat alone and dedicate festive red rice cooked by the Shrine's priests in holy manner to the dragon's spirit. The cooked red rice has to be exactly three-to (to is a volume unit and 1-to is roughly 18 liter), three-sho (1 sho is 1.8 liter) and three-go (1 go is 0.18 liter) to serve the nine heads.
To sum it up, Blue Seed is like a mixture of Inuyasha (which I despise), Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I love), and Buffy (which I adore). Would be nice on Adult Swim...probably not worth buying retail.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:49 PM | TrackBack
June 11, 2006
"Well, we'll go through these forms with a fine toothed comb, cross the 't's and dot the... lower case 'j's."
Numbers stations are an old method for secure communication. An agent with a shortwave radio sets up a recorded, looped broadcast of a series of numbers. The numbers are a message, encoded with the only truly secure kind of encryption, a one-time pad. Anyway, Slashdot recently made me aware that number stations have moved to internet telephony. The agent posts an ad to Craigslist, containing a phone number. That number, when dialed, answers with a series of numbers. Since that /. post, a third numbers message has appeared.
The phone numbers stations, when called, play a short message reminiscent of ordinary numbers stations normally heard on shortwave radio. On May 8, someone posted a message to Craigslist with a telephone number which, when called, played such a message, and on May 29, a second message was posted to Craigslist with a different telephone number and a different message.
Early this morning the typical message “For Mein Fraulein” appeared on Atlanta Craigslist, shooting down the theory Wil Wheaton put forth about the next posting appearing in Boston.
For Mein Fraulein
Mein Fraulein,
I hear the weather in the South is good this time of year. Won’t you call me?
///678///248///2352///
The number, when called, does what you expect by now. You would hear this recorded message (MP3) playing groups of numbers, each group repeated twice, apparently for clarity. The numbers are:
Group 134
00300 30020 79087 02202 50150
75031 06501 00110 67027 06607
90640 21079 02107 90000 72018
06501 60000 12008 06801 90180
15088 03108 40730 29024 02500
60760 79013 01107 70950 07071
01806 9070
As you can see, it’s a shorter message than the previous two, and seems to follow the same basic patterns.
The telephone number is owned by Global Crossing, a wholesaler of VoIP and other telecommunications services. The VoIP retailer is still unknown.
Here's a page with animal sounds as written in different languages compiled in a nice old-school table.
"It's weird stuff," says Boyd. "We sent a pulse through an optical fiber, and before its peak even entered the fiber, it was exiting the other end. Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward, linking the input and output pulses."
"Einstein said information can't travel faster than light, and in this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light," says Boyd. "The pulse of light is shaped like a hump with a peak and long leading and trailing edges. The leading edge carries with it all the information about the pulse and enters the fiber first. By the time the peak enters the fiber, the leading edge is already well ahead, exiting. From the information in that leading edge, the fiber essentially 'reconstructs' the pulse at the far end, sending one version out the fiber, and another backward toward the beginning of the fiber."
Boyd, along with Rochester graduate students George M. Gehring and Aaron Schweinsberg, and undergraduates Christopher Barsi of Manhattan College and Natalie Kostinski of the University of Michigan, sent a burst of laser light through an optical fiber that had been laced with the element erbium. As the pulse exited the laser, it was split into two. One pulse went into the erbium fiber and the second traveled along undisturbed as a reference. The peak of the pulse emerged from the other end of the fiber before the peak entered the front of the fiber, and well ahead of the peak of the reference pulse.
But to find out if the pulse was truly traveling backward within the fiber, Boyd and his students had to cut back the fiber every few inches and re-measure the pulse peaks when they exited each pared-back section of the fiber. By arranging that data and playing it back in a time sequence, Boyd was able to depict, for the first time, that the pulse of light was moving backward within the fiber.
To visualize Boyd's reverse-traveling light pulse, replace the mirror with a big-screen TV and video camera. As you may have noticed when passing such a display in an electronics store window, as you walk past the camera, your on-screen image appears on the far side of the TV. It walks toward you, passes you in the middle, and continues moving in the opposite direction until it exits the other side of the screen.
A negative-speed pulse of light acts much the same way. As the pulse enters the material, a second pulse appears on the far end of the fiber and flows backward. The reversed pulse not only propagates backward, but it releases a forward pulse out the far end of the fiber. In this way, the pulse that enters the front of the fiber appears out the end almost instantly, apparently traveling faster than the regular speed of light. To use the TV analogy again—it's as if you walked by the shop window, saw your image stepping toward you from the opposite edge of the TV screen, and that TV image of you created a clone at that far edge, walking in the same direction as you, several paces ahead.
"I know this all sounds weird, but this is the way the world works," says Boyd.
Seeing through walls, down to the molecular spectroscopic signature, with terahertz imaging. Terahertz imaging is one of those things I like to harp on every once in awhile...not sure whether it's cool or scary, how this is progressing. Put this stuff in orbit and you've got a truly all-seeing eye:
Argonne engineers have successfully performed the first-ever remote detection of chemicals and identification of unique explosives spectra using a spectroscopic technique that uses the properties of the millimeter/terahertz frequencies between microwave and infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum. The researchers used this technique to detect spectral "fingerprints" that uniquely identify explosives and chemicals.
The Argonne-developed technology was demonstrated in tests that accomplished three important goals:
- Detected and measured poison gas precursors 60 meters away in the Nevada Test Site to an accuracy of 10 parts per million using active sensing.
- Identified chemicals related to defense applications, including nuclear weapons, from 600 meters away using passive sensing at the Nevada Test Site.
- Built a system to identify the spectral fingerprints of trace levels of explosives, including DNT, TNT, PETN, RDX and plastics explosives semtex and C-4.
The millimeter/terahertz technology detects the energy levels of a molecule as it rotates. The frequency distribution of this energy provides a unique and reproducible spectral pattern – its "fingerprint" – that identifies the material. The technology can also be used in its imaging modality – ranging from concealed weapons to medical applications such as tumor detection.
The technique is an improvement over laser or optical sensing, which can be perturbed by atmospheric conditions, or X-rays, which can cause damage by ionization. Operating at frequencies between 0.1 and 10 terahertz, the sensitivity is four to five orders of magnitude higher and imaging resolution is 100 to 300 times more than possible at microwave frequencies.
These Argonne sensor specialists will continue to probe the basics of sensor technology and continue to develop devices that protect the nation's security interests.
Other potential applications for these technologies, in addition to security, include nondestructive evaluation of parts, environmental monitoring and health, including testing human tissue and replacing dental X-rays.
Controlling computers with your mind is a limited reality with the brain computer interface.
The Wadsworth system, one of several that detects electroencephalographic (EEG) activity, is based on an algorithm that analyzes the brain waves and identifies peaks in activity that correspond to particular mental efforts.
As Dr. Brunner concentrates on the "B" of "bonjour" in a keyboard-like grid of letters and symbols taking up half the screen, a computer randomly highlights lines of characters in rapid succession.
Each time the row -- vertical or horizontal -- containing the letter "B" is illuminated, Brunner's brain emits a slightly stronger signal. It takes the computer about 15 seconds to figure out what letter he is looking at. The system is doubly adaptive, with both the software and the person using it becoming more efficient over time.
"It may not sound very practical, but for someone who is paralyzed it can make all the difference in the world," says Sellers.
Indeed, for at least one 48-year old neurobiologist in the United States stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- an invariably fatal degenerative disease that attacks nerve cells -- the Wadsworth BCI technology has make it possible not only to communicate but to continue working, even though he can no longer even move his eyes.
"He writes grant proposals, sends e-mails and can use the keyboard of a computer at home," Sellers said of the man, whom she did not identify in order to protect his privacy.
Bose-Einstein Condensate? Ancient, Chinese secret, huh?
It all starts with a pigment called Han purple that was used more than 2,000 years ago to color Xi'an terra cotta warriors of the Qian Dynasty. The pigment is known in the scientific world as BaCuSi206 -- and when magnet lab scientists exposed it to very high magnetic fields and very low temperatures, it entered a state of matter that is rarely observed.
The most recent research, published in today's issue of the journal Nature, shows that at the lowest temperature point at which the change of state occurs -- called the Quantum Critical Point -- the Han purple pigment actually loses a dimension: it goes from 3D to 2D.
Theoretical physicists have postulated that this kind of dimensional reduction might help explain some mysterious properties of other materials (high temperature superconductors and metallic magnets known as "heavy fermions" for example) near the absolute zero of temperature, but until now, a change in dimension had not been experimentally observed.
We live in three dimensions; up-down, front-back and left-right are the options. A sound wave, for example, "exists" in three dimensions and propagates in all of these directions simultaneously. If we could take a picture it would look like an expanding balloon. A wave in two dimensions looks like ripples on the surface of a pond. Ripples propagate on the surface only; they don't propagate perpendicular to the surface, which is the third dimension.
They observed that at high magnetic fields (above 23 tesla) and temperatures between 1 and 3 degrees Kelvin (approximately -460 degrees Fahrenheit), the magnetic waves in three-dimensional crystals of Han purple "exist" in a three-dimensional world as per conventional wisdom. However, below those temperatures, near the quantum limit, one of the dimensions is no longer accessible, with the unexpected consequence that magnetic ripples propagate in only two dimensions. (Kelvin is the temperature scale used by scientists; zero degrees Kelvin is absolute zero, a temperature so low it is experimentally unreachable.)
The magnetic waves in the pigment exist in a unique state of matter called a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC), so named for its theoretical postulation by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. In the BEC state, the individual waves (associated with magnetism from pairs of copper atoms in BaCuSi2O6) lose their identities and condense into one giant wave of undulating magnetism. As the temperature is lowered, this magnetic wave becomes sensitive to vertical arrangement of individual copper layers, which are shifted relative to each other – a phenomenon known as "geometrical frustration." This makes it difficult for the magnetic wave to exist in the third up-down dimension any longer, and leads to a change to a two-dimensional wave, in very much the same way as ripples are confined to the surface of a pond.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:38 PM | TrackBack
June 10, 2006
"No, you can't 'play with it.' You wouldn't enjoy it on as many levels as I do. The colors, children! Look at the colors!"
The Simpsons and Fermat's Last Theorem: via
In the 1995 Halloween episode of the award-winning animated sitcom The Simpsons, two-dimensional Homer Simpson accidentally jumps into the third dimension. During his journey in this strange world, geometric solids and mathematical formulas float through the air, including an innocent-looking equation: 178212 + 184112 = 192212. Most viewers surely ignored this bit of mathematical gobbledygook.
On the fan discussion site alt.tv.simpsons, however, the equation caused a bit of a stir. "What's going on, he seems to have disproved Fermat's last theorem!" one fan marveled, referring to the famous claim by Pierre de Fermat—proved just months earlier—that for any exponent n bigger than 2, there are no nonzero whole numbers a, b, and c for which an + bn = cn. The Simpsons equation, if correct, would be a counterexample to the theorem, meaning that the proof had been wrong.
Plug the equation into any run-of-the-mill calculator and it seems to check out. The 12th root of 178212 + 184112, according to a calculator, is 1,922. Yet it's easy to see that the equation is false, because the left-hand side is odd, while the right-hand side is an even number. There's no paradox here: It's simply a matter of the calculator's round-off error.
To David X. Cohen, the Simpsons writer who concocted the equation, the fans' responses were a source of glee. Cohen had written a computer program specifically to look for what mathematicians call Fermat "near misses": combinations of numbers a, b, c, and n that come so close to satisfying Fermat's equation that they would seem to work when tested on a calculator.
VisualHub is a new Mac video converter that can do grid computing, spreading parts of encode batches to different machines over a local network. via
How-To: make the perfect fruit salad and get laid via
5. Half a handful of raisins. Raisins usually come in a large metal cylinder which holds more raisins than you will eat in your lifetime. On the bright side, they last forever; raisins have a longer half-life than Windows XP. Think of this can of raisins as an investment in your future. Take what you need, close the can, put it in the fridge, and dig it out again for next summer’s fling. I once had a can of raisins that outlived four relationships, three apartments, two states, and a cat.
I promise a real post with way more links in it some day real soon now.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:05 PM | TrackBack
i've gone over 24 hours without a post, and if i tried to think up a title i'd have to go even longer
At one point in Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver, Leibniz shows two characters some fossils in a Harz silver mine. Here's some nice new research on the mini-dinosaur fossils of the Harz mountains.
When unusually small dinosaur fossils were found in a quarry on the northern edge of the Harz Mountains in 1998, it was initially assumed that these were the remains of a group of young dinosaurs. This was a fallacy, as the Bonn palaeontologist, Dr. Martin Sander, recently discovered. The microstructure of the bones, he says, makes it very likely that the animals involved were adults – a scientific sensation: at a maximum estimated weight of one tonne they were only a fiftieth the weight of their closest relatives, the brachiosaurs, and thus by far the smallest of the giant dinosaurs which have ever been found.
A new production method might make titanium's cost drop 90%. via
Since the early 1950s, titanium has been produced through the Kroll process. Manufacturers first make titanium chloride, which gets processed into titanium tetrachloride, and then mixed with magnesium, which draws out the titanium and produces chlorine gas. The result is a porous material, contaminated with magnesium salts, which requires further processing to remove the salts and make it usable for manufacturing. The process is so toxic that it's difficult to get the permits needed to build a new plant in order to expand production.
Sadoway says their process is much greener. They mix titanium oxide with other oxides, such as magnesium oxide or calcium oxide; then they heat the mixture to about 1,700 degrees Celsius. This produces a bath of molten oxides, through which an electric current can be run. The electricity produces electrolysis, breaking the bond between the titanium and oxygen atoms, and the heavier titanium sinks. The result is a pool of liquid titanium at the bottom and oxygen bubbling out the top. The other molten oxides remain in place, acting as the electrolyte when more titanium oxide is added. "You just keep making more and more and more metal," Sadoway says.
...and that's it. I know, really short post...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:16 AM | TrackBack
June 08, 2006
"Then the world war dropped like a sudden storm out of a clear sky, and by the time it was over the whole world had changed."
In 1917, before even a handful of presidents had been offed (and when Wilson, one of the worst, remained on), our first red-scare Congress resolved to build up a legislative wall between the chief executive and his many potential executioners. Murder was already a crime in this country, as was the attempt to commit murder, but the law did not differentiate between a president and a dirty voter, at least where victimhood was concerned, despite the fact that the president clearly was not of the people, was not a common citizen given great responsibility by the people, but was rather a great man in need of uncommon protection from the people. That is, he was a party hack, often delusional, whose permission to rob and mislead the people for the benefit of his friends had not yet been cemented into law, and whose ability to perform that function was being compromised every time one of the suckers managed to shoot him.
I hardly mean to imply that George W. Bush is a delusional party hack whose aim is to rob and mislead us for the benefit of his friends. That idea deserves to be stated outright: George W. Bush is a delusional party hack whose aim is to rob and mislead us for the benefit of his friends. What I mean to imply is that his free ride on our backs was made possible by the clever solution Congress found to its conundrum back in 1917: a law that deems guilty of a federal offense anyone who knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail . . . any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States . . . or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat. . . .
Consider for a moment the simple brilliance of the language here. It presupposes, not always wrongly, that the stupidity of the American character will demand an announcement of any grand and deadly intention beforehand, and it manages also, via that lovely invocation of the mail, to implicate as a possible assassin (and certainly an “inciter to violence”) anyone who does not adequately curb his anger in a publication. All publications were then, and most still are, conveyed through the mail. Touché.
By the end of WW2, Japan had one hell of a submarine. With a bonus Hemingway allusion (see the title of this blog entry):
In 1945, just after Japan surrendered to the United States to end the second world war, a Japanese I-400 class submarine– the likes of which Americans had never seen– surrendered to a Navy destroyer. The Americans were surprised at the submarine's enormous size, and subsequent inspections continued to astonish. It was about 60% larger than the largest US submarines, twice as fast as the fastest US subs, and had the fuel capacity to travel around the Earth one and a half times before refueling. Perhaps most impressively, it was also an aircraft carrier.
The submarine had space for three specialized Japanese airplanes, called Seiran, which translates literally to "storm out of a clear sky." Before the Japanese surrender, this particular submarine's original mission had been to secretly sail westward from Japan to the US east coast, where an attack would be unexpected, and use its three aircraft to drop rats and fleas infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases upon New York, Washington D.C., and other cities along the eastern seaboard. When problems made that plan infeasible, the sub was retasked to bomb the Panama canal from the east, but the end of the war arrived before the crew could carry out its mission.
Text Processing in Python is supposed to be a good advanced text on programming with lots of strings. via
Before the 1950s, benzedrine inhalers were common and socially accepted.
Bush 41 tried to get Rumsfeld fired earlier this year, and even recruited a replacement Def. Sec., but Bush 43 ignored his father.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:26 PM
June 07, 2006
"Ralph, are you eating your paste?"
So I'm feeling too lazy for a real post tonight. Instead, I'm just going to paste in an IM conversation from earlier and pepper it with some links.
• colin: 10:38:19
hey man
• jonathon: 10:38:40
hi
• colin: 10:38:47
how's it going?
• jonathon: 10:40:35
*shrug* all right. teaching myself the PHP programming language so I can add some recursivity to that spotlight vlc streaming script. wanna make it so the script accepts input instead of only sending output to vlc. that way i can add fun stuff like customizing the stream's characteristics and adding multiple movies to the playlist at once.
• jonathon: 10:40:37
you?
• colin: 10:41:03
hah, nothing like that ;P
• colin: 10:41:27
at the moment just stupidly obsessing over the ongoing saga of the stolen sidekick
• jonathon: 10:41:49
?
• colin: 10:41:57
eh, its stupid
• colin: 10:42:07
showed up on mefi a few hours ago
• colin: 10:42:29
some person got their sidekick stolen, so now they're carrying out this online revenge thing
• jonathon: 10:42:39
oh that...i'd been seeing headlines about a stolen sidekick in my news aggregator for a few days, haven't bothered to click any of the links to read about it
• colin: 10:42:41
but the guy sounds like a tool, so i'm sort of hoping it stays stolen
• jonathon: 10:42:44
heh
• colin: 10:43:38
did you ever follow that chinese guy whose wife cheated on him on WoW, and he got like all of China hunting for the kid she cheated with?
• colin: 10:43:49
THAT shit was funny
• jonathon: 10:43:50
no
• colin: 10:44:14
this whole idea of online mob justice is really interesting to me
• jonathon: 10:44:31
heh
• jonathon: 10:44:39
mefi is actually a center of that kind of stuff
• colin: 10:44:46
yeah
• colin: 10:45:02
i really just get a kick out of the comments
• colin: 10:45:23
it's fun watching someone get flamed cause, like, they linked to youtube or something ;P
• colin: 10:45:36
people are a bit too 3l1te
• jonathon: 10:45:46
hehe and see, the really heated arguments don't even take place in metafilter proper
• jonathon: 10:45:59
they take place over in MeTa, Meta-Talk, the grey page
• colin: 10:46:12
hah
• colin: 10:46:18
yeah, i don't really follow that
• jonathon: 10:46:29
the best metafilter site is ask.me
• colin: 10:46:29
i waste enough time already on that shit
• colin: 10:47:00
i wanna know more about that thing you posted on yesterday
• colin: 10:47:10
the greek astronomical computer
• jonathon: 10:47:35
the antikythera mechanism is one of the coolest bits of history imo
• colin: 10:48:12
yeah, sounds like an ancient pascal adding machine or something
• colin: 10:48:17
(i think that was pascal)
• jonathon: 10:48:22
up there with the sky disc, the baghdad battery, that greek spherical steam engine, and the egyptian formula for finding the volume of a frustum
• colin: 10:48:34
what's the sky disc>?
• jonathon: 10:49:22
the sky disc is this artifact they found recently in germany, that shows that the ancient barbarian hordes had figured out how to coordinate lunar and solar calendars like 800 years before we have any records of the sumerians doing it
• colin: 10:49:43
wow
• jonathon: 10:51:52
the antikythera mechanism's also a triumph for the individual scientist. when it was first discovered, no one believed it was an advanced astronomical tool...they thought it was some simple astrological aid or something. then an amateur historian/horologist built a working model of the device...he was shot down by the experts....then another individual compelled the museum to do a full x-ray study of the device, and it turned out the amateur had gotten it right, even for details they hadn't known about yet
• colin: 10:52:17
hah, cool
• colin: 10:52:33
do they have a design posted anywhere?
• jonathon: 10:53:38
there must be somewhere....off the top of my head, the only other link i have to it from my blog is this economist article with a nice shot of the one of the mechanism's gears:
• jonathon: 10:53:39
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1337165
• colin: 10:54:27
that's cool
• colin: 10:54:48
i didn't know the greeks could do the kind of machining or metal working required for something like that
• jonathon: 10:55:38
well see that's the thing--according to established historical thought, they DIDN'T and that in fact is often listed as one of the reasons they fell to the romans who DID have that kind of technical mastery
• colin: 10:56:16
yeah
• colin: 10:56:25
but, i mean, how do they know the greeks actually built it?
• jonathon: 10:57:08
inscription's in greek, was on a greek ship, found off a greek isle
• colin: 10:57:57
heh, ok
• jonathon: 10:58:01
that and the device is popularly attributed to a greek philosopher, Poseidonius, based off of a citation of Cicero
• colin: 10:58:11
but it was on its way to rome, right?
• colin: 10:58:24
so it could have been roman technology, just built in greece
• jonathon: 10:59:10
well that point in time i think such boundaries are rather vague
• jonathon: 10:59:34
it probably was roman in the sense of having been paid for by a roman
• colin: 11:00:35
yeah
• colin: 11:00:45
really fucking cool, anyway
• colin: 11:00:54
keep me updated, if you come across anything
• jonathon: 11:00:55
however, while my knowledge of that period of time is not very strong, i believe that at the time of JC (caesar not christ) the romans were mostly importing cultural stuff from greece, not exporting knowledge, and that if it was a roman design it would have been built in italy
• jonathon: 11:01:06
there are some awesome documentaries out there about it
• jonathon: 11:01:17
i first learned about it on discovery or the history channel several years ago
• colin: 11:01:35
yeah
• colin: 11:01:52
i'd like to see the replica in action
• colin: 11:02:07
someone should make an applet or something
• jonathon: 11:03:25
http://www.etl.uom.gr/mr/index.php?mypage=antikythera
• colin: 11:03:51
hah, nice
• colin: 11:03:54
thanks
• jonathon: 11:04:38
ugh looks though like those movies are archived in .rar so you have to download them, un-rar them, and then view them instead of just watching them embedded in the page
• colin: 11:04:58
yeah
• colin: 11:05:02
<shrug>
• jonathon: 11:05:34
bunch of good info here: http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythera5.htm
• colin: 11:06:10
it bears repeating: how did people live without the internet?
• jonathon: 11:06:26
slowly and slovenly
• colin: 11:06:54
"hey, do you have any more information on that antikythera thing?" "sure! meet you at the library of congress tomorrow morning!"
• jonathon: 11:08:36
"oh yeah, i'll just send you a microfiche of this june 1959 popular mechanics issue. expect it in a couple of weeks, give or take."
• colin: 11:08:47
heh
• colin: 11:09:01
people are gonna be so goddamn smart someday
• jonathon: 11:10:37
i read something recently....in, i think it's 2016...there's going to be no one under the age of 40 who remembers a world without personal computers
• jonathon: 11:10:59
that's supposed to be when things start getting really crazy
• colin: 11:11:14
heh
• jonathon: 11:11:21
when the kids who were born during the dot-com boom reach the age of majority
• colin: 11:11:22
not until they work out memory transplants
• jonathon: 11:12:49
not that far from memory transplants. we've got basic neuro-silicon hybrids working, and have started to figure out how to use statistics to build a vocabulary of brain waves that correspond to what someone's looking at.
• colin: 11:13:26
i dunno man
• colin: 11:13:48
figuring out how we process visual signals is pretty different from figuring out how we store memories
• colin: 11:13:53
we're still pretty in the dark on that one
• jonathon: 11:16:24
actually the latest research seems to show that when we remember something we reprocess it as if we were experiencing it again. so when we remember a picture we once saw, we first "see" the picture again in our heads, in a predictable, computer-extractable way:
• jonathon: 11:16:25
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10575555/
• jonathon: 11:18:22
actually knowing about how the memories are STORED can wait for later, if we can loophole past that and just shunt things directly to cortex and let the brain take care of hashing it for storage in the hippocampus, and we can record memories by artificially stimulating them and logging the replay.
• colin: 11:18:51
heh, maybe
• colin: 11:19:30
but you'll never get that crazyass, matrix-style superfast learning unless you figure out how to actually store it...experience is pretty meaningless for that
• jonathon: 11:20:08
matrix-style learning is probably overrated anyway
• jonathon: 11:20:29
without a certain amount of repetition, the neuronal pathways aren't going to be trained the same way
• colin: 11:20:46
but don't you think if you understood the mechanism, you could simulate that?
• jonathon: 11:20:52
so it'd be all flowers for algernon...you'd have to reflash your brain before every test;>
• colin: 11:21:15
i mean, there's definitely a reason some people have photographic memories
• jonathon: 11:21:19
no....the preference for certain synapses is a chemical-electrical process and i'm not certain it could be sped up
• jonathon: 11:22:01
yeah but it could easily be due to structural differences in the brain, extra striation patterns in the hippocampus or something....not easily patched with a chip
• colin: 11:22:13
i dunno
• colin: 11:22:27
i feel like if you figured out how memories are stored, you'd basically unlock consciousness
• jonathon: 11:22:38
oh god no
• colin: 11:22:58
why not?
• colin: 11:23:49
your consciousness is really nothing but the result of continual backward propagation among neurons, right? same as stored memories
• jonathon: 11:25:22
brains are symbol machines. they process symbols in various ways. the memories are the symbols, the consciousness is how the symbols are manipulated. i do not believe in the brain as a deterministic state machine where you can extrapolate backwards to an original state. i'm sort of a fan of roger penrose's theory that consciousness rests in the tiniest of neuronal pathways, the ones so small that the electrons flowing through them stop following mechanical physics and get some quantum interference.
• colin: 11:28:42
well, i guess i sort of disagree...quantum effects being for the most part negligible, the entire universe is a deterministic machine, us included. granted, the network of neurons that make up a higher-order animal's brain is so complex that it would require computational power probably beyond that 10^23 number we were talking about to extrapolate backwards to its beginning. Not to mention it's so dependent on incoming sensory data that you'd have to reproduce all of that, as well, i guess.
• colin: 11:29:42
and i really don't believe our brains take advantage of quantum states
• jonathon: 11:30:17
i am not so sure the entire universe is a deterministic machine. in fact, i'd venture the opposite, that it is indeterminable, especially because i think cause and effect are human constructs.
• colin: 11:30:54
hah, well, insofar as things are predictable by our physical laws, i think it is deterministic
• jonathon: 11:30:59
our brains don't take advantage of quantum states, they're just influenced by quantum behavior because the tiniest of synapses are small enough to act as 2-dimensional quantum wires
• colin: 11:31:00
i do sort of agree with you about that though
• colin: 11:31:25
so you're saying they use teleportation?
• jonathon: 11:32:33
i don't think the universe is predictable by our physical laws. our physical laws are a result of our perceptions, and as such are heavily distorted and far from objective. they provide a framework for us to make some guesses that usually turn out to be true about our immediate environs, but i suspect they would fail if we tried to model the whole universe on them--and not just because of incompleteness.
• colin: 11:33:38
it's an interesting idea, but it ultimately reduces everything to subjectivity, including an idea like "objective"
• colin: 11:34:30
i think we would fail to model the whole universe precisely because of incompleteness
• colin: 11:35:11
i think if we were given the data for the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, and a computer powerful enough to handle it, we could predict the future
• jonathon: 11:35:15
no, not teleportation. quantum wires just don't follow the classical resistance formula. you have to model the electrons as waves and figure out how they interact with nearby atoms.
• jonathon: 11:36:15
it doesn't reduce everything to subjectivity....just what should be--like observations monkeys make about space and time. that's subjective, no way around it.
• jonathon: 11:37:46
i think that if we had the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, and a computer powerful enough to handle it, we would be able to stastically model possible futures, but never to the point that we could say "this will happen next" or "we guarantee this won't happen next" or even "we guarantee we've considered every possible option even if we're wrong about how likely one is."
• colin: 11:39:05
well, i mean, of course we can never be certain...we're fish in a bowl speculating about what's in the other room. but we can, like i said, infer laws based on perceived patterns in observable phenomena
• colin: 11:39:56
and i understand that our perceptions are unreliable, and all that, but unfortunately, they're all we have...so it's kind of defeatist, i believe, to just throw up our hands and say we can't ever know anything. you have to have a measure of pragmatism
• colin: 11:40:42
what would prevent us from knowing the future with certainty in that situation?
• colin: 11:41:32
(if you grant that the computer itself is outside of this physical system, as it couldn't with accuracy factor itself into this)
• colin: 11:42:48
and also forgetting about deus ex machina, metaphysical shit
• jonathon: 11:42:51
well we're going to build in all our human discriminations into the system's laws
• jonathon: 11:42:58
like time-binding events
• jonathon: 11:43:04
and expecting cause and effect
• jonathon: 11:43:49
some of our assumptions will turn out not to be true
• colin: 11:44:23
i don't see how the collisions and dissolutions of particles is an assumption in any practical sense
• jonathon: 11:45:33
well there's the wave/particle issue for one
• colin: 11:45:39
true
• colin: 11:45:53
and i agree that our understanding of physics is incomplete
• colin: 11:46:03
but i don't think that's gonna be forever
• colin: 11:46:10
i think there will be a GUT some day
• colin: 11:46:40
and that would be all you would need
• jonathon: 11:46:46
that's very optimisitic of you
• jonathon: 11:46:59
i think we'll continue to approach greater and greater precision in our calculations
• jonathon: 11:47:12
develop new brances of physics, combine old ones
• jonathon: 11:47:23
but any GUT will really be GUT-1
• jonathon: 11:47:44
like the old woman who thinks the earth is supported by turtles, all the way down
• jonathon: 11:48:08
now i want to make sure you're not getting the wrong impression here
• jonathon: 11:48:15
i'm not saying it's futile to try to model the universe
• colin: 11:48:24
the only thing preventing a GUT, at this point, (as I, with my very limited understanding, remember it) is quantum gravity
• jonathon: 11:48:28
or futile to try to simulate consciousness as a series of memories
• colin: 11:49:38
heh
• colin: 11:49:54
well, i think both ARE pretty futile ;P
• colin: 11:49:59
just not theoretically impossible
• jonathon: 11:50:18
see i'd say they're not futile but theoretically impossible;P
• colin: 11:50:38
hah
• colin: 11:50:39
well ok then
• colin: 11:50:45
i think we've reached an impasse ;P
• jonathon: 11:52:01
there's more than one thing preventing a GUT, btw. for example, we don't even know if the standard model is true yet. wait till we have the lhc running full-steam and know whether or not the higgs boson exists.
• jonathon: 11:52:42
oh we've been at an impasse this whole time, because we differ on the fundamental point of whether or not the universe is deterministic;>
• colin: 11:52:52
yeah, or until they make a fucking black hole ;P
• colin: 11:53:03
or strange-ify the whole world
• colin: 11:53:14
true true
• colin: 11:53:38
i mean, i guess i just don't see how it couldn't be...even if we don't understand all it's workings
• colin: 11:53:47
god's computer certainly does
• jonathon: 11:53:49
they made a black hole at the center of the earth in a sci-fi novel i read recently. they look back on it as "the Big Mistake."
• colin: 11:53:53
motherfucker ain't rollin' no dice
• colin: 11:54:34
hah
• colin: 11:54:47
i love that there's even anyone to look back on that
• jonathon: 11:54:52
see i think the universe is god's computer AND god, and he won't fully understand it until it's over. if it even ends. and if it doesn't, then that makes the universe god's endless quest for self-understanding. (this is a very jewish way of looking at things)
• colin: 11:54:58
hid in their bomb shelter, rode out the black hole
• jonathon: 11:55:19
no, migrated to other stars during the few hundred years it took for the tectonic plates to fold in on themselves
• colin: 11:55:29
hah, ok
• colin: 11:55:50
very spinozan
• colin: 11:56:00
(spinoza-esque?)
• colin: 11:56:09
i've been reading through his ethics a little bit
• colin: 11:56:21
they excommunicated him for saying that sort of thing
• jonathon: 11:56:32
spinozian maybe?;>
• colin: 11:56:39
or whatever jews call excommunication
• colin: 11:56:44
hah, yeah, that sounds right
• jonathon: 11:57:09
yeah there's a little of spinoza's pantheism/pansophism mixed in...he got a lot of it from jewish mysticism, tho
• colin: 11:57:39
yeah, true
• colin: 11:57:55
it just didn't jive with their protestant host countries ;P
• jonathon: 11:59:23
like the ancient concept of tikkun, that after god created the universe it fell and shattered into innumerable shards like a broken clay pot, and that the mission of the jewish people is to mend the pieces, try to reconstruct it....this is just extrapolating the same thing out to the deity. it's all there, but it's jumbled, and you can't see how it all fits together until it's done, which is the same as its beginning
• jonathon: 12:01:05
anyway i'm way too sober to be having this conversation, which would be well suited to 2am on a thursday night with bong in hand
• colin: 12:01:09
yeah...spinoza considered god a process. the substance of the physical world, and its animation.
• colin: 12:01:19
hah, here here.
• jonathon: 12:01:25
i've always meant to learn more about process philosophy
• colin: 12:01:37
yeah, it's about time for me to go to bed i guess
• colin: 12:01:50
yeah, i know absolutely dick about philosophy
• jonathon: 12:01:56
the summer before the senior year of high school, chris powers was telling me how albert whitehead thought that god was the collapse of quantum wave forms
• colin: 12:02:44
so god doesn't exist as possibility, only occurence?
• jonathon: 12:02:51
unfortunately, i've never read anything of whitehead's beyond the first half of his history of the great ideas of western civilization
• jonathon: 12:02:55
no, god's the choice
• jonathon: 12:03:10
god's whether schrodinger's cat is dead or alive
• colin: 12:03:21
well, yeah, i mean if you're gonna find god anywhere in physics, it's in randomness
• jonathon: 12:03:27
the occurence is the effect, god is the cause
• jonathon: 12:03:28
yep
• jonathon: 12:03:31
and THAT
• jonathon: 12:03:38
would be the perfect moment
• jonathon: 12:03:46
for a segue into the riemann-zeta function
• colin: 12:03:52
lol
• colin: 12:03:55
night man ;P
• jonathon: 12:03:57
were it not whatever time of night where you are
• jonathon: 12:03:58
heh
• jonathon: 12:04:00
goodnight
• colin: 12:04:07
talk to you later, have a good day
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:58 PM | Comments (1)
June 06, 2006
"No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen."
Arrays, HTML, and PHP is Tim Perdue's report of what he learned coding Sourceforge.org.
The first domesticated plant was the fig? via
Figs were domesticated around 11,400 years ago, roughly 1,000 years before the major staple crops, according to Ofer Bar-Yosef, an anthropology professor at Harvard University, and Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Israel's Bar-Ilan University. Earlier, scientists had thought figs were domesticated around 6,000 years ago.
The group found nine small figs and 313 fig drupelets (a small part of a fig) at Gigal I, a village in the lower Jordan Valley. The village was abandoned 11,200 years ago. The carbonized figs were not distorted, which suggests they may have been dried, sort of the way Trader Joe's sells them today. Similar fig drupelets were found 1.5 kilometers west of the area.
The ancient figs are members of a variety of fig called parthenocarpic and differ from modern wild figs. These figs develop without insect pollination and stay on the tree, allowing them to become soft and edible. These figs, however, do not produce seeds and can't reproduce on their own. Reproduction can occur only if humans plant shoots. Thus, the existence of the figs means that husbandry was taking place.
The Gigal figs were found with wild barley and acorns, indicating that humans around this area still ate many wild ingredients. That, or they were experimenting with nouvelle cuisine.
Researchers have deciphered the inscription on the Antikythera Mechanism, but the article unhelpfully fails to communicate what the inscription is. via
Gallows humor from Enron's email servers: via
How to Explain Enron to Your Children:
Feudalism - You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
Fascism - You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.
Communism - You have two cows. Your neighbors help take care of them and you share the milk.
Totalitarianism - You have two cows. The government takes them both and denies they ever existed and drafts you into the army. Milk is banned.
Capitalism - You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell the milk and retire on the income.
Enron - You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Islands partnership secretly owned by the CFO of the publicly listed company who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more, and that these and certain other cow-related activities give milk, both realized and unrealized/notional, at an annual run rate of 1.54 billion gallons.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:23 PM
June 05, 2006
"It is possible that the noosphere contained thought patterns in the form of very weak energy until we developed radio transmission; whereupon the energy level of the noosphere went out of bounds and assumed a life of its own."
What if Cory Doctorow visited a Radio Shack? via
CORY DOCTOROW: Let me ask you this: does this phone play quadraphonic Ogg Vorbis music format? Or FLAC encoded video? What about the Bittorrent client on this phone, is it GPL’d?
EMPLOYEE: I’m not entirely certain that the phone actually has a Bittorrent client. This brochure –
CORY DOCTOROW: You’re not certain? I guess you’ve forced me to ask: is the source code available for this phone? Not that I plan to do anything personally right now with the source, but I’d like to see it. Now, if possible, my good man. Chop chop!
I remember reading about an open-source, universal software radio a few years ago. It would accept all radio frequencies at once, and use signal transformations to extract different data. Now, it's a reality, and costs $550, and Wired has a nice write-up of it. Behold the GNU Radio!
After few minutes of normal Linux messing around ("Takes forever to boot.... Haven't got the sound driver working yet....") he turns the laptop around to reveal a set of vibrating lines in humps and dips across the screen, like a wildly shaking wireframe mountain range. "Here," he explains, "I'm grabbing FM."
"All of it?" I ask.
"All of it," he says.
Building a general radio that can receive and transmit, and attaching it to a software system that can fill in the gaps of what we normally think of as radio, is kind of like the Enterprise's deflector dish: Give engineering 20 minutes and it can do anything the captain needs to move the plot along. One of Ettus' USRPs, with the right daughterboards and radio software, can capture FM, read GPS, decode HDTV, transmit over emergency bands and open garage doors.
Blossom is working on a passive radar system that will require a more sensitive hardware setup than the current USRP. His passive radar reads in the ambient radio waves from existing sources, like FM stations and cell towers, and uses them to build a map of the area. At the end of his research, he plans to have "this little gadget that you can plug into a laptop and see what's flying around. We're hoping to see stuff on the order of 50 to 70 kilometers away."
Samsung has a new 3.5" hybrid touch screen LCD. Older ones have a touch sensor array overlaid on top of the screen, this one is built right in. I bet this will be in the touch screen iPod.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:34 PM
June 04, 2006
"All right, anyone who doesn't not want to avoid passing the midterm exam, raise your hand now. Okay. Those of you who raised your hands will fail, as you requested."
I bought Salling Clicker earlier tonight. It's a utility that lets you control your computer with a Bluetooth cellphone. I broke down and bought it after I realized it had network sharing. See, I don't have Bluetooth on my PowerMac. But I do have it on my PowerBook. With Salling Clicker's network sharing in effect, my laptop can relay commands to my desktop via my home network, letting me use my phone to control my PowerMac even though the latter doesn't have Bluetooth. Now that I think about it, with some SSH port translations in place, this might make my phone an easy way to control my desktop computer when I'm away from home without bothering to open a VNC session. I'm also excited about the scripting possibilities Salling Clicker offers...
MediaCentral is a sort of work-alike of Front Row (Apple's nascent media center interface) that seems to be compatible with more file types.
Stephen Colbert gave a commencement address recently: via
"Today is about you," Colbert told the 250 graduating students. "You've packed your heads until your skulls are all plump, like sausages of knowledge.
"I don't know if they've told you what's been happening in the world while you've been matriculating," he said, as if he were about to impart a bit of wisdom. "The world is waiting for you people with a club."
The comedian took it in stride and pressed on to tell students to always "say yes" to opportunities that present themselves later in life.
"In fact, say yes as often as you can," he said. "You are about to start the greatest improvisation of all."
Last year, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama gave the commencement speech and recently wrote a letter to Colbert to give him some tongue-in-cheek advice.
"Before you deliver your remarks in front of literally millions fewer people than you would at say, a nationally televised political convention, I'd like to offer you a few words of advice," Obama wrote. "First, I know you're fond of your Peabody awards, whatever those are, but I'd recommend not bringing them. The students at Knox are down-to-earth and not impressed by material possessions like my Grammy award for best spoken-word album."
Colbert's recommendation for success in life was a simple one.
"The best advice I can give you is to get your own TV show," he said. "The hours are good, it pays well and eventually, some nice people will give you a doctor of fine arts degree for doing jack-squat."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:34 PM
June 03, 2006
"Magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be 'stored'—in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course."
How-To: make a magic wand out of a gyroscopic mouse and a Mac running the Quicksilver utility. via
Now you have the basic ingredients for a functional wand-like device that runs under OSX using mostly free software. Grab the index finger trigger and push the right mouse button on the Gyration mouse, and wave it in the the air (you don't have to wave it at the computer screen, that's part of the fun). Enjoy the magic.
Quicksilver's gesture recognition software isn't the best (it's not like the IBM SHARK stuff I described earlier), but it's better than other alternatives that I've seen. And, because it works with Quicksilver, that means that there's a large library of knowledge about actions that can be triggered with the gestures. To me, the most interesting possibility, and one that I'll be playing with, is that Quicksilver can issue arbitrary commands, including command-line input to software that can control things back in the "real" world. Command-line input to Processing or NADA, for example, will allow easy magic wand control of things like, oh, Roombas, lights, giant mechanical beasts or teleporters. Hide the computer, disguise the mouse, and action at a distance is yours. Kinda.
Flash Video Player is the client-side script used by services like YouTube.
red5 is an (under development) open source Flash video streaming server. via
Strangely, Apple's pulled out of Bangalore, moving their planned support center to another, unspecified country. via
The company had commenced operations in April and hired about 30 people for its subsidiary, Apple Services India Pvt Ltd.
At a meeting on May 29, Apple announced its decision to lay off all its employees. Apple officials told them that "the company is revaluating its operations and has thought of pulling back its Indian operations".
Apple is giving these employees a severance package of two months salary. It will settle all claims on June 9. When contacted, Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesperson, said, "We have re-evaluated our plans and have decided to put our planned support centre growth in other countries."
Sony's PlayStation PR head has quit.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:28 PM
June 02, 2006
"He flipped a toggle on the railing of the balcony on which they stood in the center of a globe that looked like a bubble of air at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."
My PHP-based video on demand system is approaching optimiditudity, a word I just made up.
Here are some web design resources I've had on my screen lately:
XMLHttpRequest and AJAX for PHP programmers
Selectutorial - CSS Selectors
Invasion of the Body Switchers (using JavaScript to switch between style elements)
DHTML expand and collapse div menu
Seven ways to toggle an element with JavaScript
Top 10 custom JavaScript functions of all time
PHP Manual: the foreach construct
PHP - sorting arrays
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:11 PM
June 01, 2006
How-To: Mac OS X Tiger Video on Demand Streaming with Apache, PHP, VLC, and Spotlight
Part Zero: Setting up Apache for PHP
(see Overview: Video streaming under Mac OS X Tiger with Apache, PHP, VLC, and Spotlight)
Mac OS X comes with Apache pre-installed. There's also a trim copy of PHP, it just has to be enabled.
This part of the tutorial is only guaranteed to work under Mac OS X Tiger; later parts will be guaranteed to only work under Mac OS X Tiger. Got that?
You'll also need to do some basic stuff at the command line.
(If you don't know how to get to the command line, Terminal.app is located in your /Applications/Utilities directory.)
At the terminal, type:
sudo vi /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
You'll have to enter your administrator password to edit the file. Then use your arrow key to scroll down until you see:
#LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
Delete the pound mark (#) at the beginning of that line.
(In vi, you can do this without leaving edit mode. Just use the arrow keys to move the cursor over the offending pound signs and hit the X key. X deletes the single letter under the cursor, in vi.)
Do the same for another line further down:
#AddModule mod_php4.c
Write and quit.
(In vi, this is done by typing escape, then : (colon), then wq, then enter.)
Restart Apache. You can do this either by typing
sudo apachectl graceful
...at the command line or by stopping and starting Personal Web Sharing in the Sharing Preferences of the GUI.
Again at the command line, type:
tail /var/log/httpd/error_log
You should see a line similar to this, announcing PHP is on:
[Thu Jun 1 22:55:32 2006] [notice] Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin) PHP/4.4.1 configured -- resuming normal operations
Now, open a new document in TextEdit. Make sure you're in plain text mode, not rich text. Paste this as the contents:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Save the document in /Library/WebServer/Documents as:
info.php
Finally, in your web browser, go to
http://localhost/info.php
The default PHP information screen should appear, formatted as HTML. That's it. PHP is on. The slumbering giant stirs!
In the next part of the tutorial, we'll set up VLC for streaming. After that we'll get back to PHP in order to design the Spotlight-powered script. Speaking of scripts, doesn't it seem like the whole process of this part of the tutorial could be shortened to a shell script or Automator workflow? Hmmm...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:32 PM