One thing's for sure, though. Despite the dearth of activity these past few weeks, I haven't forgotten about ubiquit.us, and, no, it is not dead.

The archives of the Jedi council were designed off of the Long Room Library at Dublin's Trinity College. via

The old Library of Trinity College is Burgh's masterpiece and was built between 1712-1732. A huge building, it originally towered over the university and city when it was completed. The building has undergone two major adaptations since it was constructed. Originally the Library was placed on an open ground floor arcade whose purpose was to insulate the books from damp. This was filled in during the 19th century for more shelf space. The timber barrel vaulted ceiling ie not original either, being added by celebrated architects Deane & Woodward in 1858-60. Originally the library had a high flat ceiling.

Is it too much of a coincidence that designers at Lucas Films would produce a library with not only a similar book arrangement to the Long Room, but a similar roof? A roof that was not original but added by later generations to solve a specific problem? The original flat ceiling was causing the external walls to buckle, and the insertion of the barrel vault was the preferred option to reintroduce structural integrity to the building. Additional supports were added which run from the floor to the ceiling along the edge of the bookstacks. Each library bay became structural and is vaulted at right angles to the main vault.

There's something magical about inverse power: the laws of gravity predict the spread of plant pathogens.

"It turns out insects are more likely to move shorter distances between better plants," write the authors. "Interestingly, then, the probability of disease being passed between two plants goes up if they are closer and/or better, which parallels the stronger gravity between closer and larger planets."

The researchers tracked a fungal disease spread by bees and moths in the course of pollinating and feeding on nectar from white campion flowers at the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station. As predicted by the behaviour of insects, the disease was more likely to spread shorter distances between plants that had many flowers.

Bjornstad and colleagues have previously shown that similar patterns describe the spread of measles among cities, because people tend to travel more between large towns or only short distances.

There's a new collision attack on the SHA-1 hash. Until now, SHA-1 was the more secure sibling of a hash method called MD5. A hash contains a set of data, but scrambles it. The way it's supposed to work, there's only one feasible unique hash for one set of data. Last year, someone figured out how to find what were until now unfeasible alternate hashes, or collisions--a circumstance where two sets of different data hash to the same scrambled code. The problem with last year's attack, though, was that the alternate set of data couldn't be user-selected. It was just nonsense. Because of that, it was pretty much impossible to use hash collisions to inject malicious code. However, the new collision method does allow the attacker to inject selected data: via

The latest violation means that the attacks against the reduced step SHA-1 variant has reached the same level as, for example, the attack against the old MD5 algorithm. The most successful previous attack against SHA-1, by Wang, had until now been inconsequential in practice, because the hash twins produced were always completely unreadable. Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML documents with a long nonsense part after the closing </html> tag, which, despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage have the same hash value.

Stephen Jay Gould's "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse" explains how and why Disney re-designed their mascot, over and over again, to make him like more infantile. via

In one of his most famous articles, Konrad Lorenz argues that humans use the characteristic differences in form between babies and adults as important behavioral cues. He believes that features of juvenility trigger ""innate releasing mechanisms" for affection and nurturing in adult humans. When we see a living creature with babyish features, we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness. The adaptive value of this response can scarcely be questioned, for we must nurture our babies. Lorenz, by the way, lists among his releasers the very features of babyhood that Disney affixed progressively to Mickey: "a relatively large head, predominance of the brain capsule, large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency, and clumsy movements." (I propose to leave aside for this article the contentious issue of whether or not our affectionate response to babyish features is truly innate and inherited directly from ancestral primates--as Lorenz argues--or whether it is simply learned from our immediate experience with babies and grafted upon an evolutionary predisposition for attaching ties of affection to certain learned signals. My argument works equally well in either case for I only claim that babyish features tend to elicit strong feelings of affection in adult humans, whether the biological basis be direct programming or the capacity to learn and Fix upon signals. I also treat as collateral to my point the major thesis of Lorenz's article---that we respond not to the totality or Gestalt, but to a set of specific features acting as releasers. This argument is important to Lorenz because he wants to argue for evolutionary identity in modes of behavior between other vertebrates and humans, and we know that many birds, for example, often respond to abstract features rather than Gestalten. Lorenz's article, published in 1950, bears the title Ganzheit und Teil in der tien'schen und menschlichen Cemeinschaft--"Entirety and part in animal and human society." Disney's piecemeal change of Mickey's appearance does make sense in this context--he operated in sequential fashion upon Lorenz's primary releasers.)

Lorenz emphasizes the power that juvenile features hold over us, and the abstract quality of their influence, by pointing out that we judge other animals by the same criteria--although the judgment may be utterly inappropriate in an evolutionary context. We are, in short, fooled by an evolved response to our own babies, and we transfer our reaction to the same set of features in other animals.

Many animals, for reasons having nothing to do with the inspiration of affection in humans, possess some features also shared by human babies but not by human adults---large eyes and a bulging forehead with retreating chin, in particular. We are drawn to them, we cultivate them as pets, we stop and admire them in the wild- while we reject their small-eyed, long-snouted relatives who might make more affectionate companions or objects of admiration. Lorenz points out that the German names of many animals with features mimicking human babies end in the diminutive suffix chen, even though the animals are often larger than close relatives without such features--Kotkehlchen (robirr), Eichh6mchen (squirrel), and Kaninchen (rabbit), for example.

In a fascinating section, Lorenz then enlarges upon our capacity for biologically inappropriate response to other animals, or even to inanimate objects that mimic human features. 'The most amazing objects can acquire remarkable, highly emotional values by "experiential attachment' of human properties. . . . Steeply rising, somewhat overhanging cliff faces or dark storm-clouds piling up have the same, immediate display value as a human being who is standing at full height and leaning slightly forwards'-that is, threatening.

We cannot help regarding a camel as aloof and unfriendly because it mimics, quite unwittingly and for other reasons, the "gesture of haughty rejection"` common to so many human cultures. In this gesture, we raise our heads, placing our nose above our eyes. We then half-close our eyes and blow out through our nose--the "harumph" of the stereo-typed upper-class Englishman or his well-trained servant. "All this," Lorenz argues quite cogently, "symbolizes resistance against all sensory modalities emanating from the disdained counterpart." But the poor camel cannot help carrying its nose above its elongated eyes, with mouth drawn down. As Lorenz reminds us, if you wish to know whether a camel will eat out of your hand or spit, look at its ears, not the rest of its face.

As a second, serious biological comment on Mickey's odyssey in form, I note that his path to eternal youth repeats, in epitome, our own evolutionary story. For humans are neotenic. We have evolved by retaining to adulthood the originally juvenile features of our ancestors. Our australiopithecene forebears, like Mickey in Steamboat Willie, had projecting jaws and low vaulted craniums.

Our embryonic skulls scarcely differ from those of chimpanzees. And we follow the same path of changing form through growth: relative decrease of the cranial vault since brains grow so much more slowly than bodies after birth, and continuous relative increase of the jaw. But while chimps accelerate these changes, producing an adult strikingly different in form from a baby, we proceed much more slowly down the same path and never get nearly so far. Thus, as adults, we retain juvenile features. 'To be sure, we change enough to produce a notable difference between baby and adult, but our alteration is far smaller than that experienced by chimps and other primates.

A marked slowdown of developmental rates has triggered our neoteny. Primates are slow developers among mammals. We have very long periods of gestation, markedly extended childhoods, and the longest life span of any mammal. The morphological features of eternal youth have served us well. Our enlarged brain is, at least in part, a result of extending rapid prenatal growth rates to later ages. (In all mammals, the brain grows rapidly in utero but often very little after birth. We have extended this fetal phase into postnatal life.)

But the changes in timing themselves have been just as important. We are preeminently leaning animals, and our extended childhood permits the transference of culture by education. Many animals display flexibility and play in childhood but follow rigidly programmed patterns as adults. Lorenz writes, in the same article above: "The characteristic which is so vital for the human peculiarity of the true man--that of always remaining: in a state of development--is quite certainly a gift which we owe to the neotenous nature of mankind."

Phosphoinositides are at the center of the universe.

Well inositol metabolism seemed to be involved in everything, including oncogenesis and cell migration the only two important cellular activities.

So what the hell is inositol, phosphoinositides and all those inositol metabolites? I'll make this simple and then overload your neocortex. Inositol is a sugar polyalcoholcyclohexane molecule. It's hydroxyl groups can be phosphorylated to form phosphoinositides. Up to 6 phosphates can be linked to Inositol's six hydroxyl groups ... if all of the hydroxyl groups get phosphorylated you end up with inositol-hexaphosphate, or IP6 (see image). Inositol can also be linked to diacylglecerol to form phosphatidyl-inositol (PI).

So how do they act? Basically inositol derivatives are some of the most important second messengers in the cell.

I don't remember when I first heard the story of Abélard and Heloise. Maybe it was when I saw Being John Malkovich, but I think I'd already known about it then. Regardless, I was entirely unaware that it really happened! I thought it was just an earlier form of the Tristan and Isolde legend, not history. via

Peter Abélard was born around 1079 in Brittany. In 1100 he came to Paris where he was taught by one of the great scholars of the day, William of Champeaux. But he turned on his teacher and destroyed his reputation. The fight was over Plato's universals. Is everything on earth merely an imperfect copy of a perfection in heaven? Is there a perfect table at which the angels sit? Abélard said no - a stone can be a perfect table if it is fine to eat bread from. It is the function of things on earth that make them perfect, not their relationship to a heavenly abstraction.

This approach led Abélard into dangerous waters. He was beginning to define our modern individualism, how we speak of ourselves and question our place in the world. As the theologian Constant J Mews, our foremost authority on Abélard and Heloise, summarises it: "Did 'man' have any real existence as an abstraction, or did there exist simply individual men? Abélard's reading of the few texts of Aristotle then available in Latin translation led him to reject the reality of 'man' as a general notion. What mattered were the words that we might invent to describe any particular subject, whether it existed or not."

Abélard became the most famous philosophers of his day, founding his own school at the abbey of Monte-Sainte-Geneviere, on the left bank of the Seine at Paris. This was probably around AD1112. Heloise was the niece of Fulbert, a canon at the church of Notre Dame in Paris. Nothing is known of her mother or father. Her voice calls out to us clear as a bell across the centuries. She is as much a heroine of our time as she was of hers: fearless in her sexuality, intellectually Abélard's equal, a woman who appears in history as totally self-invented. There was no one like her before, and millions who have wished to be like her since. With Fulbert's blessing she became Abélard's pupil and at once his lover.

Rumours of sightings of them making love in the fields outside Paris spread like wildfire. She became pregnant with their son, Astralabe. For a while she left Paris and lived with Abélard's father and sister in Brittany. But foolishly they returned to Paris to attempt a reconciliation with Fulbert. Heloise at first refused point blank to marry. "The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding," she wrote, "but sweeter for me will always be the word friend, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore." Against every fibre in her being, she gave in. They were married secretly. But this seems to have inflamed Fulbert's anger all the more. He wanted revenge and had it. Members of his family burst into Abélard's lodgings and castrated him. Peter entered the monastery of St Denis as a monk. Heloise entered the convent of St Argenteuil as a nun. And then their lives really began. They reinvented themselves, and this real life Tristan and Isolde lived their "love in death" for another 30 years. He became an abbot, she an abbess of a convent, the Paraclete, which Abélard built for her. The famous lovers became famous religious teachers.

Quantum mechanics, tryptamine, and you. Or, the DMT elves are real. Or, we really are quantum machines. Sorry, I've been sitting on this gem of a link so long I can't decide on a way to sell it. The way they teach high school students how enzymes work is through geometry: the shape of the catalyst lets it bring two other molecules close by so they'll interact. I guess the reality is...a little more complicated. Check out the [via] link for more details from MetaFilter members. This article will blow your mind by combining quantum mechanics and an entheogenic neurotransmitter to explain the biological processes at the heart of all forms of life. via

Chemical reactions often face a problem: An energy barrier stands between the reactants and products. In the case of this simple reaction, a proton needs to gain enough energy to leave the reactant molecule in order for the reaction to occur. Quantum tunneling allows the reaction to proceed through the energy barrier, rather than having to climb it.

"While classical theory states that enzymes speed up the reaction by lowering the energy barrier, quantum tunneling allows the reaction to occur by tunneling through the barrier," Leys said. "As such, the reaction can occur at greater speeds than if the particle would have to reach energies high enough to surmount the barrier."

According to study co-author Adrian Mulholland, from the University of Bristol, researchers have previously shown that quantum tunneling accounts for proton transfer using deuterium—a form of hydrogen with both a proton and a neutron in its nucleus, instead of standard hydrogen, which has only a proton in its nucleus. When deuterium is involved, the reaction slows down drastically, because tunneling is much less likely with the larger, two-particle nucleus that more closely approximates a classical particle.

The experiment shows that enzymes move a few of their atoms that reside very near the substrate, and as these get closer to the substrate molecule, the possibility of proton tunneling increases.

"Relatively subtle, short-range motions at the active site affect the crucial distance between the groups between which the proton is exchanged, Mulholland said via e-mail, "And so, [they] can promote, or drive, tunneling."

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.

Macro photography techniques

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.

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.

The PS3 will do Folding@Home.

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.)

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 ….

Horse-fat fries

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.

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.

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

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."

Lefties earn more.

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.

# 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

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"

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

Fundie math: 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

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.

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

Origami bottle opener via

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.

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.

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.

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