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August 28, 2006
~A mass of tears have transformed to stones now / Sharpened on suffering / Woven into slings / Hope lies in the rubble of this rich fortress / Taking today what tomorrow never brings~
So yeah, taking a long weekend from a blog is a bad idea, because then you end up doing the same thing again...
Nice article about using screen
Basically, screen allows you to create virtual terminals which are not connected to your actual xterms or console screens. You can then disconnect from a screen session and reconnect from somewhere else while preserving your shell or other running processes. For an introduction to screen, check out this Linux.com article.
This is just the beginning of screen's power and flexibility. You can connect to a session more than once using the -x argument to screen. That means you can for example leave your mail program running in a terminal (under screen) at work and then connect from home to read your mail in the same process. There's no need to disconnect at work, and when you come back in the next morning your mailer will be exactly as you left it, with all your state perfectly preserved.
Screen takes this feature, which is called multi-display mode, to the next level with multi-user mode. In multi-user mode more than one user can access and control a screen session. The problem with this mode is that it's not obvious how to set it up.
There are lots of ways to go about getting magnification with a camera, and I'll talk about many of them here. The topics below are arranged roughly in order of difficulty.
Here's a good comparison photo that shows why RAW is better than JPEG for image detail.
Wikipedia on prescription vs. description in linguistics.
Last year the USDA came up with some fun food safety tips for college students:
leftover pizza is safe for 3 to 4 days
"The Dialect of the Appalachian People"
The reason our people still speak as they do is that when these early Scots and English and Germans (and some Irish and Welsh too) came into the Appalachian area and settled, they virtually isolated themselves from the mainstream of American life for generations to come because of the hills and mountains, and so they kept the old speech forms that have long since fallen out of fashion elsewhere.
Things in our area are not always what they seem, linguistically speaking. Someone may tell you that "Cindy ain't got sense enough to come in outen the rain, but she sure is clever." Clever, you see, back in the 1600's meant "neighborly or accommodating." Also if you ask someone how he is, and he replies that he is "very well", you are not necessarily to rejoice with him on the state of his health. Our people are accustomed to use a speech so vividly colorful and virile that his "very well" only means that he is feeling "so-so." If you are informed that "several" people came to a meeting, your informant does not mean what you do by several - he is using it in its older sense of anywhere from about 20 to 100 people. If you hear a person or an animal referred to as ill, that person or animal is not sick but bad-tempered, and this adjective has been so used since the 1300's. (Incidentally, good English used sick to refer to bad health long, long before our forebearers ever started saying ill for the same connotation.)
Many of our people refer to sour milk as blinked milk. This usage goes back at least to the early 1600's when people still believed in witches and the power of the evil eye. One of the meanings of the word blink back in those days was "to glance at;" if you glanced at something, you blinked at it, and thus sour milk came to be called blinked due to the evil machinations of the witch. There is another phrase that occurs from time to time, "Man, did he ever feather into him!" This used to carry a fairly murderous connotation, having gotten its start back in the days when the English long bow was the ultimate word in destructive power. Back then if you drew your bow with sufficient strength to cause your arrow to penetrate your enemy up to the feathers on its shaft, you had feathered into him. Nowadays, the expression has weakened in meaning until it merely indicates a bit of fisticuffs.
One of the most baffling expressions our people use (baffling to "furriners," at least) is "I don't care to. . . ." To outlanders this seems to mean a definite "no," whereas in truth it actually means, "thank you so much, I'd love to." One is forevermore hearing a tale of mutual bewilderment in which a gentleman driving an out-of-state car sees a young fellow standing alongside the road, thumbing. When the gentleman stops and asks if he wants a lift, the boy very properly replies, "I don't keer to," using care in the Elizabethan sense of the word. On hearing this, the man drives off considerably puzzled leaving an equally baffled young man behind. (Even the word foreigner itself is used here in its Elizabethan sense of someone who is the same nationality as the speaker, but not from the speaker's immediate home area.
Reverend is generally used to address preachers, but it is a pretty versatile word, and full-strength whisky, or even the full-strength scent of skunk, are also called reverend. In these latter instances, its meaning has nothing to do with reverence, but with the fact that their strength is as the strength of ten because they are undiluted.
In the dialect, the word allow more often means "think, say, or suppose" than "permit." "He 'lowed he'd git it done tomorrow."
A neighbor may take you into her confidence and announce that she has heard that the preacher's daughter should have been running after the mailman. These are deep waters to the uninitiated. What she really means is that she has heard a juicy bit of gossip: the preacher's daughter is chasing the local mail carrier. However, she takes the precaution of using the phrase should have been to show that this statement is not vouched for by the speaker. The same phrase is used in the same way in the Paston Letters in the 1400's.
Almost all the so-called "bad English" used by natives of Appalachia was once employed by the highest ranking nobles of the realms of England and Scotland.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:48 PM | TrackBack
August 24, 2006
"Guybrush Threepwood? That's the most ridiculous name I've ever heard!" "Well what's your name?" "Mancomb Seepgood."
A fugitive was tracked down when he had his Skype call traced by a private detective. I'm betting he was using SkypeOut to call a regular telephone.
Because of DRM security concerns, Windows Vista won't play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray on 32-bit processors.
However, it will play back high-def video if, instead of buying HD DVDs, you just download copies of them off the Internet -- talk about a perverse incentive.
Someone's made it so the Nintendo DS version of ScummVM works with a Datel Max Media Dock. This means I can play all the LucasArts games I grew up on, with a stylus.
(Yeah, I know, weak post.)
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:49 PM | TrackBack
August 23, 2006
"The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone."
Wenger's über-knife
Engadget has some nice analysis of Apple and Creative's patent settlement. Pretty strange, Creative going into making iPod gear and Apple getting in on any future licensing fees Creative imposes on the rest of the digital audio player market.
In other news of weird alliances, Rupert Murdoch is getting buddy-buddy with Bill Clinton. As Ken-Layne-as-Wonkette puts it:
They’re not even trying these days. Poppy Bush and Clinton vacationing together, Blair and Clinton giving the corporate pep talk at the annual News Corp. retreat, the Hannity and Lieberman show ….
The Vatican's astronomer's been fired for critical thinking:
They cite one source condescendingly claiming that Coyne "appointed himself an expert in evolutionary biology," while Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute (speaking of unqualified gits appointing themselves the status of 'expert') calls Coyne an "evangelizing Darwinist," and blames his fall on his radical theology. It seems to me that Coyne was actually a highly qualified scientist who was well-informed about the general principles of science, and who informed the Vatican about the actual status of the discipline of evolution within the domain of science.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:48 PM | TrackBack
August 22, 2006
"Wormholes?" "Giant worms. Huge."
6 million years ago, most American horses and all camels and rhinos were killed off by grasses that used C4 photosynthesis.
Contrary to the popular belief that horses were foreign to the New World until they were brought here by the Spaniards, the animals actually evolved in North America, spreading to Europe by crossing the Bering land bridge that once connected Alaska and Siberia. But they later died out in North America near the end of the Ice Age.
Well before their disappearance, however, their life history took an abrupt turn that killed off all but those horses with the longest teeth. In fact, numerous other mammals, including camels and rhinos, suffered the same fate in North America.
Scientists have known that the extinctions were somehow related to expanding grasslands and shrinking forests. Grasses possess a gritty compound called silica, which is contained in sand and is used to make glass. As animals chew grass, the silica wears down their teeth. Therefore, animals with longer teeth live longer because their teeth don't wear down as fast, and they can continue to feed.
Stargate's been cancelled, and Cheyenne Mountain closed down, within a matter of weeks. Coincidence?
Apple's quietly developed multithreaded OpenGL support in OS X for games.
Uh-oh, Sony hasn't started manufacturing of the PS3 yet.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:22 PM | TrackBack
August 21, 2006
"Revenons à nos moutons."
My apologies for the abrupt cessation of daily posts; I decided to take an impromptu vacation from the blog for my final weekend of summer break.
I belatedly learned today that Apple does let the user access the resolution-independent interface scaling built into Tiger, you just have to do it from the Terminal:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.25
Retro watch inspired by Battlestar Galactica
John "dshadow" Bafford was watching an awesome, obsessively hard-sci-fi anime (with a sappy romantic heart) called Crest of the Stars and noticed something unique: air bags in space!
In one scene, the main characters crash the escape module of their shuttle into a planet, and for a fleeting second, when they're picking themselves up after coming to a stop, you can see that airbags had deployed.
This is the first time I've ever seen a shuttlecraft in any sci-fi series come with airbags. Horray for just a dash of realism in crash-landing technology!
Also Sprach Miyamoto is a clever 2001/Nintendo themed Threadless shirt. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:43 PM | TrackBack
August 16, 2006
"How would you define a left-hand glove compared to a right-hand glove so a person who had no knowledge of those terms could tell you which you meant? And not get the other? The mirror opposite?"
Kim got an unwelcome call from a push-poller the other night:
Caller: Hi, this is Tammi with the Dove Foundation. This call will only take 90 seconds of your time.
Me: (sighing internally) Okay.
Caller: Public surveys of parents and grandparents of children indicate that TV and movie ratings are becoming more lenient. What do you think?
Me: I'm not a parent. And I don't watch television.
(Note: except on DVD)
Caller: It doesn't matter. Hollywood controls most of the production for family feature films, and I'd like to know if you think that more funding should go towards movies that actual families can watch.
Me: I like dirty movies.
Caller: Well, but if you liked movies for families, don't you think more funding should go towards family feature films?
I immediately suspected that the call was somehow connected to a crazy Christian billionaire film producer I'd read about, Philip Anschutz. Anschutz was dubbed "the greediest man in America" after he swindled his own employees at Qwest Communications out of their retirement money. His pet project is Walden Media, a little film studio that puts entertainment second to morality. Their M.O. is to rip off established literary classics by adapting them into feel-good dreck, force-feed them to the public by exploiting church groups with some target marketing, and then funnel them to his own chain of Regal movie theaters:
In the run-up to the premiere, 'Narnia Sneak Peek' events have been held in churches around the country, the Christian Post reported: "At the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., members of the 20,000-plus congregation viewed exclusive clips, received free gift bags full of outreach material, and were treated to a special live performance by Steven Curtis Chapman. In addition, C.S. Lewis' stepson and co-producer of the film, Doug Gresham; Walden Media President and film's visionary Michael Flaherty; and other Narnia filmmakers discussed the making of the movie."
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that, "the Los Angeles County Probation Department [had] put together" a series of "Narnia"-related events "for its juvenile centers." "In addition to reading the book, exercises included making crumpets in cooking class and recreating the movie sets in construction class. The grand finale: seeing the movie after it comes out on Dec. 9."
Pre-release marketing efforts have reached out "to a panoply of special-interest groups, from the Coast Guard Youth Academy to Ronald McDonald House, wooing them with invitations to glitzy presentations on the studio lot and lavishing them with posters, snow globes and other promotional gear."
Walden and Disney claim that, "they have sent out 'Narnia' materials to every elementary and middle school in America. That includes posters, educational guides and more than 90,000 copies of the novel. The guides include suggested lesson plans for teachers on topics ranging from the Blitz to the art of writing music lyrics."
Sure enough, Michael Flaherty (heralded in the quote above as the "visionary" for the latest Narnia adaptation), Walden Media's President, is also an advisor to the Dove Foundation. Not surprisingly, Dove considers Walden's Narnia film the best movie of 2005. As opposed to Crash, the pick of Roger Ebert and the Oscars, or Brokeback Mountain, the top ranked film of 2005 by critics overall. I wish the Dove Foundation kept a public list of its donors...I'm curious how much of their cash comes straight from Anschutz.
Sony's started shipping 50GB Blu-Ray discs.
The fastest evolving part of the human genome only affects the brain and other sexual organs.
They found 35,000 pieces of non-coding DNA that were very similar in chimpanzees, rats, and mice. Since these mammals are separated by 100 million years of evolution, their similarity suggests these segments may be playing an important function that has been conserved by natural selection. If they didn't have a function, mutations would have built up in each lineage. They then looked at these segments (or rather, they had a computer look at them) in the human genome. They picked out segments in which the human versions had acquired a significant number of new mutations not found in other mammals. These mutations must have evolved since our ancestors split from chimpanzees.
The scientists found 49 candidate segments. These segments have evolved a lot in our lineage. The most drastically altered of all is a segment the scientists dubbed HAR1 (for human accelerated region). It is 118 base pairs long. Chimpanzees and chickens, separated by over 300 million years, carry versions of HAR1 that are identical except for two base pairs. In humans, on the other hand, 18 base pairs have changed since we split from chimps.
What's HAR1 for? This is the sort of question that seems like it should be easy to answer unless you're the scientist doing the answering. The scientists found that human cells make RNA molecules out of the HAR1 segment. Specifically, they found that brain cells do. Specifically, brain cells in the cortex, the hippocampus, and certain other regions. We do love our brains, and so it is reasonable to consider that HAR1 took on some new role in the brains of human ancestors. The sequence of HAR1 suggests that an RNA molecule produced from it would be stable enough to carry out some important job, such as regulating the activity of protein-coding genes. HAR1 probably plays several roles. It is not just active in the adult brain, but in development-guiding cells in the fetus.
In a commentary that also appears in Nature, two Oxford scientists point out that HAR1 is also active in the ovary and testis of adult humans.
Normal, everyday brain cells can become progenitors.
Last year, the researchers published details about how they used stem-like brain cells from rodents to duplicate neurogenesis - the process of generating new brain cells - in a dish. The latest findings go further, showing common human brain cells can generate different cell types in cell cultures. In addition, when researchers transplanted these human cells into mice, the cells effectively incorporated in a variety of brain regions.
The human cells were acquired from patients who had undergone surgical treatment for epilepsy and were extracted from support tissue within the gray matter, which is not known for harboring stem cells.
When the donor cells were subjected to a bath of growth agents within cell cultures, a type of cell emerged that behaves like something called a neural progenitor - a cell that is a bit further along in development than a stem cell but shares a stem cell's vaunted ability to divide and transform into different types of brain cells.
Even when the cells from the epilepsy patients were transplanted into mice, bypassing any growth enhancements, they were able to take cues from their surroundings and produce new neurons.
"That these cells were able to integrate into tissue in an animal model and actually survive - it was extremely important to show that. Now the question is what will these cells do in a human brain? Will they be able to survive for the long term and rebuild circuitry? This work is a first step toward that end."
Left-handed men with at least some college education earned 15 percent more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26 percent more, wrote Christopher S. Ruebeck of Lafayette College, and Joseph Harrington and Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:35 PM | TrackBack
August 15, 2006
"When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life."
Fun trivia for Groundhog Day on IMDB:
# On the DVD, Harold Ramis states that the original idea was for him to live February 2nd for about 10,000 years. Later he says that Phil probably lived the same day for about 10 years.
# In the original version of the script by Danny Rubin, Phil Connors was already trapped inside Groundhog Day at the start of the story. We joined him on a typical day, with the audience wondering how he knew everything that was going to happen. Harold Ramis promised not to change this aspect of the script, but ultimately decided to do so.
# According to director Ramis, most of the times when he tried to explain a scene to Murray, he would interrupt and respond, "Just tell me - good Phil or bad Phil?"
Terabyte hard drives are coming.
Dark matter's been proven, and the fine structure constant is lower than we thought it was.
A new solar cycle has possibly begun.
Fun Ask Metafilter question: "Literally is its own antonym?" via
Here's what you need to know (and believe me, this has been a hobbyhorse of mine since I first had the misfortune of being exposed to the execrable excuse for a dictionary that is Merriam-Webster): Merriam-Webster is an EXECRABLE excuse for a dictionary. The main reason it is an execrable excuse for a dictionary is that it positively delights in exactly this sort of blurring and denaturing of the English language. It thinks that the misuse of "momentarily" to mean "soon" is now acceptable, for example. It is riddled with this sort of thing. It embraces errors and ambiguities and seeks to make them valid in a way that reminds me of the empty-headed hippy English teacher: "Hey man, if the kidz are talkin' that way now, that's cool. Language evolves, maaan."
Yeah. Language evolves. But when it evolves into a three-headed torso-child it should DIE.
I hate Merriam-Webster with a passion that transcends all human understanding, and anyone who truly loves the English language should do so too. Don't let these fuckers win. Start by using Chambers.
posted by Decani at 4:34 PM PST on March 28
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:08 PM | TrackBack
August 14, 2006
"Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him - that of a giant Slorr! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slorr that day, I can tell you!"
There's this ridiculous column in HomeTheaterMag claiming there's "NO DIFFERENCE" between 1080i and 1080p. The guy uses some major rhetorical legerdemain to conflate two totally separate issues, 3:2 pulldown and de-interlacing. His claim is 1080i == 1080p, but technically all he's proving is that content looks best at its native frame rate, and that the first Blu-Ray player has a major video processing flaw. via
Movies and almost all TV shows are shot at 24 frames-per-second (either on film or on 24fps HD cameras). All TVs have a refresh rate of 60Hz. What this means is that the screen refreshes 60 times a second. In order to display something that is 24fps on something that is essentially 60fps, you need to make up, or create new frames. This is done using a method called 3:2 pulldown (or more accurately 2:3 pulldown). The first frame of film is doubled, the second frame of film is tripled, the third frame of film is doubled and so on, creating a 2,3,2,3,2,3,2 sequence. It basically looks like this: 1a,1b,2a,2b,2c,3a,3b,4a… Each number is the original film frame. This lovely piece of math allows the 24fps film to be converted to be displayed on 60Hz products (nearly every TV in the US, ever).
This can be done in a number of places. With DVDs, it was all done in the player. With HD DVD, it is done in the player to output 1080i. With Blu-ray, there are a few options. The first player, the Samsung, added the 3:2 to the signal, interlaced it, and then output that (1080i) or de-interlaced the same signal and output that (1080p). In this case, the only difference between 1080i and 1080p is where the de-interlacing is done. If you send 1080i, the TV de-interlaces it to 1080p. If you send your TV the 1080p signal, the player is de-interlacing the signal. As long as your TV is de-interlacing the 1080i correctly, then there is no difference.
The next Blu-ray players (from Pioneer and the like) will have an additional option. They will be able to output the 1080p/24 from the disc directly. At first you may think that if your TV doesn't accept 1080p, you'll miss out on being able to see the "unmolested" 1080p/24 from the disc. Well even if your TV could accept the 1080p/24, your TV would still have to add the 3:2 pulldown itself (the TV is still 60Hz). So you're not seeing the 1080p/24 regardless.
"As long as your TV is de-interlacing the 1080i correctly." Except there's no such thing as as de-interlacing "correctly." It's impossible. De-interlacing is an inherently lossy process.
Deinterlacing is the process of converting interlaced video (a sequence of fields) into a non-interlaced form (a sequence of frames). This is a fundamentally impossible process that must always produce some image degradation, since it ideally requires "temporal interpolation" which involves guessing the movement of every object in the image and applying motion correction to every object.
Artifacts will always be present in deinterlaced video, as the process must attempt to combine two fields for simultaneous presentation. Any object that is moving will appear in different positions on the two fields, and simply displaying them overlaid results in very objectionable mouse teeth, venetian blinds, or 'comb-effect' on the moving vertical edges. There is no perfect way to interpolate images in time, unless everything is moving together, as in a panned image.
1,500-year-old murder victim discovered at a Roman archaeological site in England. via
A human skeleton was found hidden in what would have been a Roman corn drier, and experts believe the person was deliberately put inside.
The six-week excavation on the former Roman farm will end this week.
The skeleton was found by a team from Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (SHARP).
On-site human remains expert Zannah Baldry said the body appeared to have been pushed into the oven and then set alight.
IBM's devised a way to store a bit of data on a single molecule, in a non-volatile, rewritable fashion. via
Crucial for investigating the inherent properties of molecules is the ability to deal with them individually. To do this, Riel and Lörtscher extended a method called the mechanically controllable break-junction (MCBJ). With this technique, a metallic bridge on an insulating substrate is carefully stretched by mechanical bending. Ultimately the bridge breaks, creating two separate electrodes that possess atomic-sized tips. The gap between the electrodes can be controlled with picometer (one thousandth of a nanometer) accuracy due to the very high transmission ratio of the bending mechanism. In a next step, a solution of the organic molecules is deposited on top of the electrodes. As the junction closes, a molecule capable of chemically bonding to both metallic electrodes can bridge the gap. In this way, an individual molecule is "caught" between the electrodes, and measurements can be performed.
The molecules investigated are specially designed organic molecules measuring only about 1.5 nanometers in length, approximately one hundredth of a state-of-the-art CMOS element.
In an old Modern Mechanix article about Thomas Edison's parapsychological experiments, I learned that Edison's spiritual beliefs were quite similar to Leibniz's monads:
It was Edison’s belief, even up to the day of his death, that life in man and animal results from the activity of countless myriads of what he called “immortal units,” endowed with intelligent direction of life and its processes.
To substantiate his hypothesis, Edison burnt his finger intentionally! (Before the finger was burned, however, the scientist had a Bertillion print made of his digit.) The burn was severe enough to obliterate all the delicate skin lines, yet after the finger had healed, another print showed that the lines and whorls, even though they had been hopelessly destroyed, had returned to their original position.
From this experiment, Edison got confirmation of his hypothesis that it is these aforementioned “immortal units” which supervised the regrowth of his finger skin, following out the original design. Man, he believed, is a mosaic of such life units, and it is these entities which determine what we shall be.
To make his hypothesis clear, Edison was wont to cite the following analogy. Suppose this earth were visited by some extraterrestrial being whose eyes were so coarse that the smallest thing he could see was the Brooklyn bridge. Naturally he would take the structure as some sort of natural growth.
Now suppose this imaginary giant were to destroy the bridge, then, after a couple of years, find it rebuilt. Don’t you suppose the giant would assume that some guiding intelligence were behind the reconstruction? That’s what Edison believed.
This Slashdot headline is so sci-fi it hurts: "Botnet Herders Attack MS06-040 Worm Hole"
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:05 PM | TrackBack
August 13, 2006
“We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the k
The open-source core of Apple's Safari browser, WebKit, now fully supports CSS-level rounded-corners and has sped JavaScript up 30%.
How-To: make your own random number generator out of a smoke detector and a web-cam. The camera visualizes the alpha radiation from the radioactive Americium core of the smoke detector. via
please explain 1 kings 7.23 and how a circle can have a circumference of 30 of a unit and a radiius of 10 of a unit and i will become a christian
23 And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.
Source(s):
1 Kings 7:23 (New King James Version)
Very easy. You are talking about the value of Pi.
That is actually 3 not 3.14.......
The digits after the decimal forms a geometric series and
it will converge to the value zero. So, 3.14.....=3.00=3.
Nobody still calculated the precise value of Pi. In future
they will and apply advenced Mathematics to prove the value of Pi=3.
Here's a handy high-rez Hubble gallery of pretty space photos. All the famous Hubble photos, linked in 1080p, collected on one page...gotta download all of these when I have the time. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:38 PM | TrackBack
August 12, 2006
~What's my secret? Frankly, dear, forgive my candor! / Family secret, all to do with herbs! / Things like being careful with the corriander, / that's what makes the gravy grander!~
Many years ago, Lynn Margulis (famous for her theory of the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria) proposed that centrosomes originated from the fusion of a spirochaete-like-organism (right, image of a spirochaete) and the prototypical eukaryotic cell. The spirochaete may have helped the host cell to move around (I never found this explanation very satisfying - the spirochaete must have offered some other benefit). In support of this idea, various publications since the 50s claimed that the centrosome contained its own nucleic acid, just like mitochondria, but these experiments were never definitive.
The new paper.
Now out of Bob Palazzo's lab (no relation ... see extra comment at the end) comes a truly remarkable finding. His group purified centrosomes from clam oocytes ... for some reason clams have huge centrosomes and thus makes this experiment a whole lot easier. Along with the purified centrosomes came ... certain specific RNAs. (But wait, people have claimed this in the past, and one of the enriched RNA was 18s ribosomal RNA, so perhaps this mRNA was contamination?) What makes this finding believable is that only certain RNAs (five in this paper) were enriched. Besides the 18s rRNA, the other four RNAs were not found in any genomic database. (For you RNA enthusiasts these RNAs have now been called cnRNAs - centrosomal RNAs.)
And one of these cnRNAs is QUITE intriguing. It encodes a protein that has similarity to 'RNA-dependent nucleotide polymerase'. Furthermore, this RNA probably gets translated into protein. (Warning: technical jargon coming up) The group made antibodies against a peptide derived from the hypothetical protein, and found an immunoreactive band in lysates from oocytes and adult clam (end jargon).
So let me rephrase this. Clam centrosomes contain RNAs not found in any genome (so far), and one of these RNAs encodes an enzyme that could potentially copy RNA? Holly replication, Batman!
Sondheim is forcing Johnny Depp to audition for Sweeney Todd in order to prove his voice. via
Tim Burton, the London-based director behind the proposed film, has been praising Depp’s singing voice, but Sondheim needs to be convinced. The composer has said that he will not approve a cinematic version of his Broadway musical, which he describes as “virtually an opera”, if the main character has to mime rather than sing.
People are still sneaking water aboard planes with trusty Nalgene bottles. via
So, I managed to get on a plane this morning while "accidentally" carrying a potent solution of 100% dihydrogen monoxide in a Nalgene bottle.
So, the screening seemed to be pretty much useless. I had first emptied out the bottle for purposes of going through the X-ray machine, just in case they were anal about it--although I've heard that X-ray machines can't "see" liquid anyway, so perhaps this doesn't matter. The empty bottle passed through with no complaints. Nobody seemed to be getting hand-searched either.
Okay, so now what?
Next, the TSA has these great signs posted directly at the gates (and at all of the food establishments) which state that all beverages need to be discarded before boarding the aircraft... even your fancy venti blended-no-foam crapuchino, but there did not appear to be any secondary screening. People still board planes as usual, which means that you wave a piece of paper at the scanner and it lets you onboard.
So, I carefully refueled my dihydrogen monoxide at the fueling station in the airport, and I was merrily able to go on my way.
If the X-ray can't really detect liquid, then this is presumably a big problem. (If it can, then I guess this is no different than the "someone smuggled a knife into the magazine store and then I picked it up" threat model.)
PS: http://www.dhmo.org/
Posted by: SD at August 11, 2006 04:05 PM
Back in the 1940s, Popular Science had fun chemistry articles for kids like "Learn About SULPHURIC ACID":
Concentrated acid is made commercially by the “contact” process in which sulphur dioxide, produced by burning sulphur or roasting iron pyrites, is passed over a heated catalyst, which causes it to combine with oxygen of the air to form sulphur trioxide. Since the finely divided sulphur trioxide cannot be dissolved directly in water, it is added to concentrated sulphuric acid, forming a superconcentrated or “fuming” acid which is easily diluted to the required strength.
You may demonstrate this “contact” process in your kitchen laboratory, with the simple apparatus shown. Your sulphur dioxide producer is a tin-can cover on which you burn a few grams of flowers of sulphur. This gas is collected by an inverted funnel held just high enough for air to come under its rim. Tubing carries the sulphur dioxide to the bottom of a pickle jar filled with lumps of calcium chloride which filter and dry it. For a catalyst, moisten a little asbestos fiber and shake it with a quarter of its bulk of iron oxide. When thoroughly mixed, dry in an oven and pack loosely in the glass tube which is arranged horizontally in your setup. The remaining flask contains concentrated sulphuric acid. The half-gallon jar is a siphon bottle which draws the gas through.
The Bunsen burner must be adjusted for gentle heat or the sulphur trioxide will decompose again. A marked increase in the concentration of the sulphuric acid in the flask occurs in a few minutes. By adding it to water—in diluting, always pour the acid into the water—you get a greater quantity of acid of the original strength.
Sulphuric acid is used in making many other acids. As an example, nitric acid— tremendously important in manufacturing explosives and cellulose films—may be made in your home laboratory, but use a glass retort as nitric acid reacts on cork and rubber.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 11, 2006
"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
I was wondering why the new Mac Pros didn't have Blu-Ray drives, what with Apple being a member of Sony's little Blu-Ray consortium. I think the answer is that computer Blu-Ray drives can't play Blu-Ray movies yet.
Superman's password is Kal-El.
It's gotten to the point that Wikipedia is its own Turing-complete programming language. via
This led us to hypothesize that Wikimedia’s template language had becoming Turing complete (the technical jargon for a full-powered programming language). We started digging and eventually were rewarded with recursive template substitution, which appears, at least at first glance, to be sufficient to implement the lambda calculus, and thereby perform as a Turing complete functional language. Hence, Wikimedia proves the Strong interpretation of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: any sufficiently advanced system will contain a functional programming language.
The sad story of the creator of FM radio, Edwin Armstrong
This fall, Jeopardy! goes hi-def, and the wall of tv monitors is replaced by a ginormous array of projectors. via
The corpse flower blooms now.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:38 PM | TrackBack
August 10, 2006
"The only true currency in this bankrupt world...is what you share with someone else when you're uncool."
For today's big story, I found the most useful information buried in the MetaFilter thread about the latest terrorist bust. You have to sift through a lot of BS, but there's good data hiding in that thread. Someone even managed to find some humor in it.
You and your fancy airplanes and your fancy luggage compartments and your fancy single serve friends.
Don't you deserve to travel in the style and luxury commensurate with your status? Consider instead, my friends, the grand steamships. White Star Line sets sails daily for New York City, the New World indeed.
Ah, these are halcyon days. Evening balls, tuxedos and dinner with the captain. The odd iceberg and Nazi submarine are trifles in the face of the impeccable duck a l'orange. Afterwards, would you care to join us on the Club Deck for billiards and brandy? Of course you would.
Or how about an airship! The dirigible is a vessel of both the noble and noblessed alike. Graf's Zeppelins truly are boats of air, sailing over the heads of the oxen and cattle, both animal and human. This is not travel, good sir, but a journey. Board with me the grandest of all, the 129. Oh, the gentility. Oh, the tranquility. Oh, the humanity.
This could be you, my friends. Sailing the skies on a boat of air, dining on cabernet and foie, passing judgment on the socialists.
So enjoy your airports, you sullen beasts of cubicled burden. Enjoy your fast food potatoes and ground beef sandwiches. Enjoy your pizzaed pies. Enjoy your sodaed beverages and your ever expanding waistlines. Enjoy the probations, indignations, and violations of the checkpoint.
I, for one, shall depart in the grand tradition.
Portnoy! To the skies!
posted by Pastabagel at 11:24 AM EST on August 10 [+ 13] [!]
Damn Interesting has a good piece about nature's nuclear reactor in Gabon. I've always wondered whether the Okla reactor had an impact on human evolution and a quick Googling seems to support that [EDIT] that's actually total bullshit, as millions are quite definitely different from billions. Wow, that was a stupid mistake on my part. Thank you for the comment, Ryan.[/EDIT]:
In 1972, natural nuclear reactor was found in a Western Africa in the Republic of Gabon, at Oklo. While the reactor was critical, approximately 1.7 billion years ago, it released 15,000 megawatt-years of energy by consuming six tons of uranium. This in itself might raise the issue of possible radiation based sources for such a rapid mutational change since radiation has long been known to cause different types of mutations. (see THE NATURAL NUCLEAR REACTOR AT OKLO: A COMPARISON WITH MODERN NUCLEAR REACTORS (WWW paper by Andrew Karam - 1998, updated 2005))
However, what one would need to look for is a simular event around 10 million years ago. But note, 2.8 million, 1.7 million and 1 million years ago coincide with major steps in human evolution as documented by the fossil record. Another factor in these periods was climatic changes. All of these themselves are over short periods of time. At 2.8 million years ago, the human family tree split into at least two major branches, Paranthropus and Homo. At 1.7 million years ago, humans' most immediate ancestor, Homo erectus, first appeared. At 1 million years ago, Paranthropus had died out and great numbers of Homo erectus began to migrate out of Africa into a variety of regions and habitats in Europe and Asia. Again the key time period was around 1.7 million years ago which does fit well with that natural reactor.
Cool photo of the sharpest manmade thing, a tungsten needle via
Watching Almost Famous on TNTHD, I'm struck by the realization that Frances McDormand's character is the movie analog of Jane Kaczmarek's character, Lois, from TV's Malcolm in the Middle. A sort of modern archetypal strong maternal figure.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:30 PM | TrackBack
August 09, 2006
"I have great respect for Dick Cheney. I don't agree with a lot of things he said in this campaign. He was a very distinguished Secretary of Defense, and I don't have anything negative to say about him."
So Lieberman lost to Lamont in Connecticut, but Joe won't to give up. It's funny. A lot of people think that the animosity the left feels for Lieberman is about the Iraq war. But it goes back further than that. Partly, it's because the guy was the first Democrat to break ranks and criticize Clinton during the whole Lewinsky scandal. In fact, that's why Gore chose him for the campaign...distancing from Clinton. Partly it was that joke of a debate he had with Cheney (see the Lieberman quote I used as a title). Those are just ancillary reasons, though.The real reason Lieberman's despised? Florida at the end of the year 2000. If you look at the tick-tock of the post-election struggle, Lieberman threw in the towel first, without consulting Gore. He was so eager to throw the match when he was up against Bush, but when it comes to a fellow Democrat, Joe just refuses to follow the will of the people.
The White House is real nervous about what Lamont's nomination bodes for the mid-terms.
The NSRC is freaking about Lamont as well.
One diarist at the Agonist thinks Lamont's win against the Republican nominee should be a no-brainer.
Kottke found a cool old article about telegraphers' intuition about the person at the other end of the wire, which I believe is called the "fist" of the tapper.
intentional leftovers == planned-overs via
Loony Christian calculus
Once a person has been called to be a Christian, we are redeemed by Christ but not released from following the law of God. We are justified once but continue with the process of sanctification for the remainder of our lives. This sanctification process is like the limit process of the secant lines approaching the tangent line. There is one distinction between the concepts of sanctification and secant line limits, however. In the mathematical contexts, we accept results that are "sufficiently close," results that are in an epsilon-neighborhood of the desired quantity. While in our quest for perfection, the "better" we get the further we realize we are from satisfying all aspects of the law.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:52 PM | TrackBack
August 08, 2006
"What is Valis, then? Why, it is the Cosmic Christ, Point Omega. I have seen what Teilhard de Chardin wrote about, although I had never read any of his writing."
Today, in the last moments of the Connecticut senatorial primary, Joe Lieberman's campaign accused Ned Lamont's campaign of hax0ring their website with a DoS attack. The reality? Lieberman had crappy hosting.
2Dog Media, LLC has not hosted the joe2006.com website for over 3 months. When the site was hosted with us, it was on a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth and daily server back-ups. The Lieberman Campaign was paying much more than $7 a month for this service. The campaign manager, Sean Smith, came on board and decided he would rather work with a friend of his that he had worked with in the past.
Kos explains just how crappy Lieberman's hosting was:
They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.
Here's the deal -- you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn't need that much bandwidth, but if you're paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin' cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don't go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out.
This is what happens when people with lab time get bored: What came out of my ear, a chemical analysis of earwax. via
So I co-spotted my earwax (EW) against cholesterol (C) and squalene (SQ). Both were in there, along with some unidentified component with an intermediate Rf that streaks a bit. No clue what that is. -addition- One of the commenters proposed that the middle spot is lanosterol; biosynthetic intermediate on the way from squalene to cholesterol.
I read a nifty article about the Omega number earlier today. via
It's also deeply non-computable; meaning that not only is it non-computable, but even computing meta-information about it is non-computable. And yet, it's almost computable.
It's sometimes called the halting probability. The idea of it is that it encodes the probability that a given infinitely long random bit string contains a prefix that represents a halting program.
1. Non-computable: no program can compute Ω. In fact, beyond a certain value N (which is non-computable!), you cannot compute the value of any bit of Ω.
2. Uncompressible: there is no way to represent Ω in a non-infinite way; in fact, there is no way to represent any substring of Ω in less bits than there are in that substring.
3. Normal: the digits of Ω are completely random and unpatterned; the value of and digit in Ω is equally likely to be a zero or a one; any selected pair of digits is equally likely to be any of the 4 possibilities 00, 01, 10, 100; and so on.
Ω is definable. We can (and have) provided a specific, precise definition of it. We've even described a procedure by which you can conceptually generate it. But despite that, it's deeply uncomputable. There are procedures where we can compute a finite prefix of it. But there's a limit: there's a point beyond which we cannot compute any digits of it. And there is no way to compute that point. So, for example, there's a very interesting paper where the authors computed the value of Ω for a Minsky machine; they were able to compute 84 bits of it; but the last 20 are unreliable, because it's uncertain whether or not they're actually beyond the limit, and so they may be wrong. But we can't tell!
What does Ω mean? It's actually something quite meaningful. It's a number that encodes some of the very deepest information about what it's possible to compute. It gives a way to measure the probability of computability. In a very real sense, it represents the overall nature and structure of computability in terms of a discrete probability.
How maciej lost walking privileges in Beijing: via
I took Claude's rebuke about not having my passport in stride - it was true, I didn't like to walk around with it because of my knack for losing important documents. But I was hurt when he took me to task for not having registered my address with the local police. Here I was, a white guy, living in the middle of a highly technologically sophisticated police state, speaking no Chinese, surrounded by willing informants, adhering to a rigid daily routine. How hard could it be to figure out where I was? Granted, keeping the gate of their secret aerospace facility closed apparently lay beyond the capabilities of the Chinese secret police, but did they require this level of handholding in everything?
Apple's fully reopened the source of Mac OS X, and totally recommitted itself to open-source in general. Or, at least, they're making a good show of it. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:48 PM | TrackBack
August 07, 2006
"Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade." — Steve Jobs, 10 and a half years ago
Apple had its Worldwide Developers Conference today, and unveiled the first Mac Pro, which finally lets the Cheese Grater design's volume be put to good use instead of clever fan systems. They also showed off the next version of OS X, Leopard. I haven't gotten around to watching the video yet, but the coolest-sounding features to me are the system-level virtual desktops (poor Virtue!) and Alex, the long-awaited successor to MacInTalk's Fred. Well, turning any part of any web page into a Dashboard widget sounds pretty cool too. And the new backup system, Time Machine, sounds like it'd be useful for people with far less data than I have.
MacRumors.com reports that Jobs suggested they were hiding some features so as to delay competition (==Microsoft).
10:29 am top secret features not being shown, just not letting you know what they are.
In perhaps related news, today Microsoft killed VirtualPC. For the past year or more they've been promising an Intel version of the Windows emulator. Poor Connectix. Once upon a time, pretty much every Mac had at least one piece of Connectix software on it. Then came OS X (to over-simplify by far), and then they were phaged by Microsoft...As Wikipedia describes Connectix:
Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they become popular.
I had planned a bunch of other links for today, but I think some those will suffice.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:49 PM | TrackBack
August 06, 2006
"Ray, when someone asks if you're a God, you say 'Yes'!"
The first color cartoons:
In preparing for a picture, an animator draws each consecutive drawing on a board over an illuminated glass at the top of which are two steel registering pegs which fit through two holes in the paper or celluloid and hold the drawings in their proper place over the glass. This enables the animator to see the preceding drawing at the same time and to gauge the distance of the following drawings concerned in any action.
Each movement of a character must be formed by a separate drawing properly placed. For example, in order that Goofy may step from the right foot to the left, five drawings are made. Nine drawings will carry him along two steps. However, 50 drawings are required for him to walk across the screen.
Todo lets you see all your OS X applications at once.
In the words of JWZ, "How is each episode of The Venture Brothers 20% more awesome than the one before? How?"
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:48 PM | TrackBack
August 05, 2006
"Why are they always named Tony?"
I slept in, and spent some time rebutting some conservative chain e-mail, and then had some friends over, and then had a big dinner, and now there's a Kubrick marathon on HDNet (2001, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange)....so no real post.
Did you know Dave never says "My God, it's full of stars" in 2001? I was so sure it was there, but, no, Dave's mute after telling HAL to sing. It was in the novel, though, and was appropriated for 2010.
There was never a point at which a script was produced for "2001: A Space Odyssey" and then followed nice and neatly scene by scene. Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole), responding to a question about the script at an appearance in 1997, was having none of it. Instead, the film was developed piece by piece (which was evidently very frustrating for Arthur C. Clarke, who was constantly making corrections as Stanley Kubrick's own ideas developed). I have a copy of a "script" myself, however it differs considerably from both the film and the book, and as it was never officially published I will not use it as a reference source (except for the sake of occasional vague interest).
"My God, it's full of stars" were Dave's final words in the book, in Chapter 39 - Into the Eye. In the film, Kubrick was perhaps thinking about Bogart in "Casablanca" at the time, as Dave signs off with "Sing it for me", and we all know what that led to. Which left the "full of stars" quote handy when Peter Hyams and the Hollywood spin merchants were casting around for a cute "tag" line for the 1984 production of "2010". They could pretend that Dave really was heard to say it, because it was printed in the book. At least they did not have to make anything up themselves.
A note from correspondent Bernard advises me that novelist Ken MacLeod has taken the "borrowing" a stage further. In "The Cassini Division", the only observer who witnesses Ganymede disintegrating into a zillion rectangular pieces mutters: "My stars, it's full of Gods". Though, since no-one else was around, it seems rather wasted.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:46 PM | TrackBack
August 04, 2006
"Hey, uh, fella, don't you think you're overreacting? I mean, my family is exposed to dangerous chemicals all the time. In fact, I remember I set off a flea bomb in the boys' room when my son Dewey was in there taking a nap." "I can smell colors."
Windows Vista is *so* not ready for use, but will be released anyway and slowly made moderately acceptable via a slew of updates and patches. via
It's relatively simple to crack a MasterLock bruteforce-style because, despite a dial that theoretically provides 64,000 numerical combinations, flaws in the tumbler system shave the number of actual combinations down to a mere 121. via
The magic number with Master locks is four. You need to find the modulus of the last digit of your lock and four. For my lock, the last digit is 19. Let's do some long division! 4 into 19=4, and 4 times 4 is 16, and 19-16=3, so we have 4 remainder 3. So, 19 Mod 4 (sometimes stated 19%4) is 3. Now, you must list all 10 of the numbers with a modulus that is equal to [LastDigit Mod 4]. That means that I am left with 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27, 31, 35, and 39.
One of those is the first digit.
The second digits are the easiest. Just add two to the possible first digits. That gives us 5,9,13,17,21,25,29,33,37,1 (39+2=41, but there is no 41, so begin at zero [NOT ONE] from 39).
Gizmodo claims Apple will launch the touchscreen iPod in November.
Let's just say that we have a couple of people fairly high up the Apple food chain who have made it known that the iPod's touchscreen is truly the bee's knees. Apple is also apparently working its tail off to make sure that the planned November launch of the new iPod will still happen.
Apparently, Pynchon coined "Segway" in Gravity's Rainbow and no one's ever noticed. via
Strangely though on page 70 of my edition, Pynchon writes: "But segway into the Roxbury hillside."
There are only three possibilities to explain this.
1. Pynchon writing in 1973, was thinking about the Segway HT, and later gave the idea and the name to Dean Kamen. Highly implausible.
2. "Segway" is an acceptable variant of "segue". This doesn't seem to be true either. Since Pynchon has used it, sometime soon the OED ought to pick it up though.
3. It is a genuine error on the part of Pynchon, and it has survived proof reading for 30 years.
The logical answer is thus that no-one has ever really bothered to read Gravity's Rainbow before [...]
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:56 PM | TrackBack
August 03, 2006
"And he says, 'Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.' So I got that goin' for me, which is nice."
Many supercapacitors currently available have electrodes made of a porous form of graphite-like substance, called activated carbon, which is cheap and can store charge. But the porosity is a drawback, because storing a lot of charge in a low-density substance requires a large volume of material, and that's bad news for making miniaturized power sources.
Béguin and his colleagues reasoned that what is needed is a form of carbon that is relatively dense, electrically conductive, and capable of holding a lot of charge. The researchers thought that cellulose, the basis of plant matter, might be suitable. This carbohydrate contains plenty of charge-holding oxygen atoms, but most of the oxygen is lost when cellulose is heated.
They then struck upon alginate, abundant in brown seaweeds, which is chemically similar to cellulose but holds on to its oxygen when heated.
The French team cooked alginate in an air-free enclosure, turning it into a black powder. They then combined this with a polymer binder to make a hard material, which they shaped into electrodes for supercapacitors.
The amount of electrical charge and energy that these devices can hold is comparable to that of capacitors made from commercial activated carbons. But the seaweed capacitors can be charged to voltages twice as high without breaking down, and the material is twice as dense. They hold up well over time, too: their charge-storage capacity declines by only 15% after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging.
Jason Kottke's learned that the gopher protocol is still going strong after all these years. Well. I mean. It's around. Strong might be a bit...strong...of an adjective.
The most complete list of HD channels, what shows they broadcast, and which cable and satellite providers offer them would have to be the The Official AVS HDTV Programming Synopsis - Summer 2006! edition from the AVS Forum.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:35 PM | TrackBack
August 02, 2006
"Goddamn you, Bernice."
Jamie Zawinski warns the world that the jellyfish's terraforming project has commenced.
The Safari WebKit makes nice with its mama.
Looks like Kodori's gonna be a flashpoint in the Caucasus for the foreseeable future.
An artist's made a real-life, digital Dali melting clock.
Still having trouble breaking the glamour the new LCD casts upon me long enough to build a decent blog post. It's surprising to me how good comedies look in high def. I wasn't expecting Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Dodgeball to be two of the first HD films I'd feel compelled to watch all the way through.... =)
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:56 PM | TrackBack
August 01, 2006
"We can't die, Bendis. You know why? Because we are so very pretty."
Wow so my HD monitor sucked my life away again today, as I exchanged my old and busted digital cable box for the new hotness of a high definition cable box. Surprisingly, Brighthouse does not charge for this transaction. For some reason, I'm also getting the extra HD channels I'm supposed to have to pay for. This bewilders me yet is ultimately quite pleasing.
DiscoveryHD is so crisp and vibrant, constant eye candy. It's like a high resolution desktop background that moves.
I have great hopes for UniversalHD. It's half the reason I decided to splurge on an HD set. Why? It has that most sublime of treats:
Battlestar Galactica in high definition. That's where I'm going to be doing on Sundays at 8 from now on. =)
And then on September 24th, the stars align. UniversalHD's programming block:
7:00 PM FIREFLY
SERENITY - PT 1
8:00 PM BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
THE FARM
Yep, Firefly in shiny high definition! Two hours of gorgeous Zoic visual effects!
In related news, I saw Serenity in HD last night (just 720p) and oh did it look good. How to describe it...You know that bit in "Serenity" (note the quotes, rather than italics, indicating I mean the 2-hour pilot episode to the TV series and not the film or the vessel itself), when Kaylee tastes one of the strawberries Shepherd Book brought when he came on board the ship, and her eyes roll back in her head from the sheer orgasmic bliss of it? Yeah, kinda like that. The picture was so sharp that when I woke up this morning the pores on the Operative's face were still seared onto my retina.
Ooooo...now I just saw an ad for Arrested Development...it's coming to HDNet this fall. I guess I lucked on a good time to move to high def.