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Peter Nixon
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Tuesday, 25 April 2006
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David Pescovitz:
A massive hole suddenly opened up in the kitchen of an Alta, California home, swallowing the owner and killing him. From CNEWS:
Authorities say the home, built in the 1980s, may have been sitting atop a decades-old underground mine. Recent rains could have softened the ground under the home, in an isolated area near Lake Alta.
"It's unbelievable," Placer County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Dena Erwin said. "From the front of the house, it's absolutely normal. Then, in the middle of the house, is this enormous hole."
Funny, I was in a friend's kitchen recently discussing the possibility of this very thing happening to us as we spoke!
Link (via Fortean Times)
[Boing Boing]
9:51:53 AM 
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Diabetes Australia in WA has welcomed a recommendation by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) that the long-acting insulin Lantus be placed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
The PBAC has recommended it be added to the scheme in an unrestricted capacity.
If the Federal Government agrees , it will bring the cost of Lantus down from $106 per phial to just under $30.
[ABC News: Health]
9:41:54 AM
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Monday, 24 April 2006
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rebarbative:
repellent; irritating
I'm going to try to use this word as much as I can in the next month or so.
[Dictionary.com Word of the Day]
10:24:04 PM
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Former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich makes his seasonal debut on Tuesday in the Tour de Romandie.
It's good to see Jan back on the bike. If Lance Armstrong hadn't turned up to make his extraordinary run, I think we would all be celebrating the great wins of Jan Ullrich. Armstrong has always said that Jan is the only cyclist he is frightened of.
[BBC Sport | Other Sports | Cycling | World Edition]
10:16:46 PM
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Sunday, 23 April 2006
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[base "]Do you know what a pessimist is? A person who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.[per thou] [~] George Bernard Shaw
Gotta love GBS.
[Thriving Quotes]
10:23:59 PM
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Saturday, 22 April 2006
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Paramount has hired Mission: Impossible III director J.J. Abrams to write, direct and produce the 11th Star Trek feature film, aiming for a 2008 release, Variety reported.
I think this augurs well for the Star Trek franchise; could they be persuaded to put him on for a new TV series?
[SCI FI Wire] [The Lackidaisical Procrastinator]
1:42:56 AM
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There is till so much to learn about the thin surface of the planet.
[Scientific American]
1:35:14 AM
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Friday, 21 April 2006
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Cycling legend Lance Armstrong is planning to compete in the New York City Marathon in November.
I have a new friend, Spiro, currently training for the NY marathon. It tickles me to think if him competing against Lance.
[BBC Sport | Other Sports | Cycling | World Edition]
1:01:48 AM
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Rolling Stone: Worst President in History?
 Atrios has an excerpt of the article.
"By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim."
You can read it here also. [Crooks and Liars]
12:51:25 AM
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Cory Doctorow:
Sherwood sez, "This Firefox extension allows you to view linked PDFs as HTML, allowing the same copy protection bypass mentioned in Cory's Use Gmail to break PDF copy restrictions post."
So here are two methods to break a copy protection protocol. Forget it guys; we need a new way of thinking about freedom of information. This is a revolution, team, so let's understand it and adapt to it, or be buried by it.
Link
[Boing Boing]
12:38:19 AM
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12:09:56 AM
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Thursday, 20 April 2006
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A German pensioner flushed bundles of old banknotes worth a small fortune down the toilet because he thought they were now worthless.
Well, as we all know, money is shit.
[ABC News: Offbeat]
11:18:46 PM
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Wednesday, 19 April 2006
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Being selfish is fun! Passing the feeling of it on to others is Life! [~] Jennifer Scotchel
While I don't favour the selfishness paradigm of human existence, I think this slant on it is kind of fun.
I think the whole virtue of selfishness thing is a pain in the arse frankly, but many years ago I read Winning through intimidation a kind of Ayn Rand view of all aspects of life.
Kierkegaard said that you have only heard a person if you have been persuaded by the power of his or her her argument.
The weird thing was that I was persuaded by the selfishness argument. A bit.
So it is a part of my thinking to this day. I still sit at the left.
[Thriving Quotes]
10:12:37 PM
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Hollywood bad boy Colin Farrell and his ex-girlfriend have reached a settlement in a bitter legal battle over a steamy sex tape they made together.
There's a lot here I don't understand.
Why do people make such tapes? Not something I'd do, but hey, that's just me.
Why do "celebrities" do it, knowing all the trouble it can cause them later?
If and when they do it, why don't they agree beforehand to destroy them in short order to avoid just such trouble?
People are crazy.
[ABC News: Entertainment]
8:25:50 AM
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Sunday, 16 April 2006
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Pop star Michael Jackson, in a bid to stave off insolvency, says he has reached a deal with creditors to refinance more than $US200 million in loans secured by his prized stake in the Beatles' song catalogue.
The Beatles catalogue was always going to be a good investment.
[ABC News: Entertainment]
1:35:12 PM
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<span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0);">This from Peter Thurmer:<br></span><img src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0111207/images/SharonJones.jpg"><br>Rocket Bar, Hindley Street, Adelaide, South Australia<br>Monday 17th of April<br>Tickets $42.50 from Blue Beat<br>
10:47:06 AM
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Interesting concept here. Using hydrocarbon fuel (crude oil I guess) to produce an alternative to hydrocarbon fuel.
[Scientific American]
10:36:39 AM
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Friday, 14 April 2006
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Cory Doctorow:
AV sez, "Remember the guy who started off with a paperclip and was trying to trade his way up to a house? Well he got up to a recording contract which he traded for free year of rent in a house in Phoenix!"
I really hope he does it. I think he will.
Link
(Thanks, AV!)
[Boing Boing]
11:19:17 AM
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Thursday, 13 April 2006
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A European space probe has successfully gone into orbit around Venus after a 400 million kilometre trip from Earth.
Venus is the poster-planet for the global warming argument; about the same size as Earth, not a significantly different distance from the sun, Venus long ago went into a complete global warming spinout. Scientists are hoping to find out why. The answers mahy save our planet.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
1:14:11 AM
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Cory Doctorow:
The winner of the Buckminster Fuller Institute's Cradle-to-Cradle competition is a photosynthetic, electricity-generating single-family home insulated with soy-foam and designed to be placed in communal blocks:
Not only does the building run a photosynthetic and phototropic skin made with spinach protein, but it also produces more energy than a single family's needs, allowing the excess to be distributed to neighbors. This radical shift, from centralized energy systems today, fosters community interdependence as neighbors benefit from the resources of others.
Man, how cool is this?
It makes my inner hippy sing with joy!
Link
(Thanks, Graffitirun!)
[Boing Boing]
12:59:31 AM
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Tuesday, 11 April 2006
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Saturday, 8 April 2006
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Our daughter is a radiant being of pure light. She is also a 17-month-old kid. Fellow SXSW speakers and panelists, if I[base ']m not in the audience for your panel today, it[base ']s not because I don[base ']t love you, it[base ']s because I[base ']m off taking care of little A__.
And if I don[base ']t show up at a dinner or party, it[base ']s because the joint serves hooch, and the State of Texas has laws forbidding little kids from entering such places. We learned about these laws last night when we were unable to join a group for dinner. Ended up in an ice cream parlor. The state frowns at exposing kids to the sins of the bars, but winks at gluttony. I remember my kids not being allowed in some usually public venues to see me play.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]
5:35:06 PM
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Friday, 7 April 2006
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Unrelated people who kiss each other on the lips for longer than five minutes in public will be arrested in the Indonesian city of Tangerang, local media say.
As someone who enjoys a lingering kiss from time to time, this saddens me.
On the other hand, five minutes does seem like a long time.
But I still don't understand why local government need get involved.
And what really concerns me is the term "unrelated people".
Presumably I could kiss my cousin for half an hour. Or my brother. Or grandmother.
[ABC News: Offbeat]
8:53:19 PM
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Apple today introduced Boot Camp, software that allows users of Intel-based Macs to install and run Windows XP.
The only predictable thing about Apple is its unpredictability.
Apparently the share price has gone through the roof.
[Macworld] [The Lackidaisical Procrastinator]
6:34:32 AM
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Wednesday, 5 April 2006
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Firefox gained enough users in March to grab 10 percent of the Web browser market -- Apple's Safari is the third most popular browser with Microsoft's IE in first place.
Interesting. I have installed (and encourage my students to use) Firefox, Safari, Camino, Opera, and maybe some other half-baked browsers. On my legacy system I still use Cyberdog. I love it. At home, I never use Internet Explorer. I don't even have it installed.
[Macworld] [The Lackidaisical Procrastinator]
10:54:00 PM
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This looks very cool; I wear graduated lenses and I hate them. I'd put up with the inconvenience of switching for the certainty that the whole lens behaved the same way.
[Scientific American]
9:46:25 PM
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Astronomers say they have spotted a cloud of alcohol in deep space that measures 463 billion kilometres across, a finding that could shed light on how giant stars are formed from primordial gas.
Gin & tonic anyone?
[ABC News: Offbeat]
9:31:50 PM
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The Northern Territory Government says a two-year eradication project has managed to wipe out the dengue fever mosquito in Tennant Creek.
Has to be good!
[ABC News: Health]
9:11:43 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
The Spelling Society maintains a page of "poems showing the absurdities of English spelling" -- and they're a hoot! Try reading one aloud.
When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it's true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose,and lose
Or is this really about the absurdities of English pronunciation?
Link
(via Plasticbag)
[Boing Boing]
8:52:01 PM
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Anyone even vaguely interested in nutrition knows this; I guess it's good to have this kind of research backing it up.
[Scientific American]
8:14:31 PM
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Xeni Jardin:
Jasmina Tesanovic
An Underworld Journey
Serbia: March 31, 2006
Heading southeast, to inner Serbia, close to the Bulgarian border.
An area famous for women who are mysteries, said my friend, the film
director Zivojin Pavlovic, whose mother was born there.
A euphemism really. In that magical region, men are rare.
It's said that girl births far outnumber those of boys.
Men marry into female families and are called "the brides."
A local wedding is a long caravan, exposed furniture
paraded on wheels, like dollhouse rooms, rolling
one
after another in display all around the city, the village, the hills.
Mother's names are always officially recorded while the father often
is simply called the shepherd, the clerk...
Presumably he is never sure the he is the father at all ...
Struggling for patriarchy , men here as almost everywhere in the world
have all the legal power, and they take their revenge on their female
husbands by beating them and often killing them. The region has a
high rate of male domestic violence.
We are a caravan of women for peace Thirty of us have a performance
in the market place: we want to celebrate our dead feminist friend,
who wrote the first history of women's movements in Serbia,
describing the past centuries of struggle. We intend to dance and
sing, and eat enormous amounts of garlic, and dine on the local dish
of stinging nettles, and drink the prohibited local black wine which
is tainted with methyl alcohol.
[image: "Grandma Lena," Serbia, by Aleksandra RadoniÄ[omega]]
Gaga is beautiful in her red shoes, long raven hair:
her husband just
tried to kill
her. She took him to the court and denied him the fatherhood to her
20 year old affectionate son who follows her like a
big shadow. She is our hostess in Zajecar. She
prepared our dinner with violently mashed and pureed foodstuffs,
in a wooden place called the Mill. Only one man is there, other than
her son. This man is attending us: he looks proud and scared...
This is the most amazing story! I've quoted very little of it here; it's quite long. It is definitely a must-read.
Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com.
Previous posts on BoingBoing:
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
-
Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral
- Link to previous posts about Jasmina's work.
 [Boing Boing]
8:30:14 AM
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Custom-made bladders grown from patients' own cells have been successfully transplanted and work, in some cases for years, scientists report.
I suppose this is good, but I'll get excited when I can grow a new heart.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
8:22:47 AM
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Tuesday, 4 April 2006
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Mark Frauenfelder:
National Geographic has a photo of a housefly wearing miniature eyeglasses, which had been "crafted and set in place with a cutting-edge laser technique. The glasses fit snuggly on the fly's 0.08-inch-wid head."
The article doesn't say whether or not the glasses improved the fly's vision (or whether or not the fly had vision problems to begin with), but they do look rather snazzy. Some people just have too much time on their hands.
Link (thanks, Max!)
[Boing Boing]
10:54:07 PM
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A University of Queensland researcher has found women who change their marital status can unwittingly push their children towards cannabis use.
This is just bizarre! Three or more marital changes doubles the chance of children using dope before the age of fifteen. Somehow I think there's more to this than meets the eye, by which I mean I think we have a correlation which does not reflect cause and effect.
[ABC News: Health]
10:48:12 PM
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Xeni Jardin:
My colleague JJ Sutherland, a producer with NPR News, shares this dispatch from Baghdad:
I get a call the other night. They've found four more bodies in western Baghdad. Three of them are in a car. They're bound, hands and feet. They're blindfolded. They've been shot in the head. Their bodies bear wounds from beatings, electrical burns, and someone has used a drill on their flesh. The fourth is the same, the only difference being that his body was tossed onto a sidewalk. That's just one phone call. I get a few more. Every night, it seems, dozens of bodies turn up, often killed in the same fashion, both Shi'ite and Sunni.
We spoke with a journalist recently for a piece we're doing. He works for an Iraqi television station. For the last nine days he's been sleeping at the office. He's been threatened with death because of his work, and he doesn't want to bring the danger home to his parents and six sisters. He told the Ministry of the Interior about the threat, they told him to get a gun.
"Death is the simplest thing now in Iraq. A bullet in the head is nothing, especially against journalists. So crying and sadness are the norm," he said to us. Later, he added, "I have been in love for the last
4 years but my conditions don't allow me to marry, not because of money but because of how things are going on. There is no stability and you never know when a civil war will breakout."
People here are more terrified than I have ever seen them.
Neighborhoods are self-segregating as one either Shi'ites or Sunnis flee out of fear for their lives. Neighbors are getting together and forming their own militias, vowing to fight the death squads that slaughter people here nightly.
A friend of mine tells me today he's bought weapons for his family, and is teaching his wife, who hates to even hold a knife, to fire a gun.
He has a daughter around two. In his neighborhood he saw a few families pack up and leave. Why? They are poor Shi'ites, usually from the south, or Sadr city, who moved to his neighborhood to work as housekeepers. The day before yesterday Sunni insugents burst into one family's home. They were a young couple, maybe 24 or 25. The husband was killed, and then they set his body on fire. They didn't bother killing the wife and four children first. They burned them alive.
My friend tells me this story and says, "I can understand someone who gets killed. I can understand beheadings. I can't understand burning someone alive." I find myself stunned. Both by his story and by the fact that killings and beheadings are understandable. Burning people alive apparently goes violates some behavioral norm that says chopping people's heads off is okay.
It is becoming very clear to me that war can shatter a society and what it becomes as it puts itself back together can become a warped malefic grotesquerie. A social organism that eagerly eats itself alive.
At a press conference the other day an American General said he thinks that Iraqis feel more secure. I think that most of the Iraqis I've spoken with since I've been here might have a slightly different perspective.
[Boing Boing]
6:25:42 AM
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Monday, 3 April 2006
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The Australian has reported that the French have lower IQ scores, on average, than most other European nations.
And this wasn't even an April 1 report!
[The Daily Grind Network]
10:53:03 PM
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US researchers said on Saturday they had transformed immature cells from men's testicles into powerful stem cells, which they then coaxed into becoming nerve, heart and bone cells.
This hasn't been peer-reviewed, but it does sound pretty exciting.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
10:32:48 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Gnat sez, "Aussie thieves try to steal a koala to sell for drug money. They get 'scratched to shit'. So they turn to everyone's #2 redeemable-for-speed animal, the freshwater crocodile. Convict genes will out! This story is remarkable for the persistent, diligent, hard-working stupidity of the criminals and the genial bemused zookeeper."
A little less of the "convict genes" crack thanks Gnat.
America was briefly a convict settlement too.
Link
(Thanks, Gnat!)
[Boing Boing]
9:10:25 PM
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Sunday, 2 April 2006
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Adam Greenfield has written one of the most provocative books in years. If the right people read it, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing may do for the coming, computerless computing interface what Don Norman[base ']s The Design of Everyday Things did for design generally. Like Norman, Greenfield argues for good design not as an aesthetic issue but as an ethical and business imperative. There is an urgency and clarity to every word.
Everyware is both a prescription and a warning. Although films like Minority Report have made such ubicomp staples as the gestural interface look a bit silly, these kinds of interactivity are coming soon to a wall or object near you. Depending on who designs them and by what principles, they will work beautifully or badly. Everyware will enhance our lives by anticipating our needs or it will destroy our privacy [~] or both.
Besides Don Norman[base ']s book, the other piece of writing I sometimes thought of as I read Everyware was Walter Benjamin[base ']s [base "]The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.[per thou] Writing in 1937, Benjamin pondered what the existence of photographic reproduction did to the status of the unique work of art. If the Mona Lisa can be reproduced by lithography, what is the value of the Mona Lisa?
It[base ']s not that Greenfield writes like Benjamin (he doesn[base ']t). It[base ']s that both writers see and can describe changes in the world to which their contemporaries are oblivious. Greenfield is a friend and former member of Happy Cog so I have an interest in seeing his book do well. But if I didn[base ']t know him or couldn[base ']t stand him I would still highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about how design and technology are shaping our time. Man I love everything Zeldman does, but I rarely post links, because his writing is often very specialised to his particular field of endeavour, so it gives me pleasure to quote the above, to show the quality of his thought, and of his passion for the rational digital life.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]
1:30:33 AM
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Apple Computer was established 30 years ago on April 1 by
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. A year later, local technology
pioneer, Rudie Hoess was introducing the Apple II computer to
Australia.
On Apple's 30th anniversary, this gives a little Australian perspective to the story. Interesting.
[The Age Technology Headlines]
1:12:43 AM
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A new study has shown that not only is prayer not beneficial, it
can actually be detrimental to heart patients...
Last year I posted about a Duke University study that showed
that praying for heart catheterization patients had no positive
effect on their health. Now a new study by the John Templeton
Foundation has found that not only did prayer have no...
Sorry, religious dudes. Come back with science please.
[morons.org headlines]
12:49:54 AM
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The use of mobile phones over a long period of time can raise the risk of brain tumours, according to a new Swedish study.
Well there you go. I hate the bloody things. I do have one. As it spends most of its life lost somewhere, it's unlikely to give me any brain tumours.
[ABC News: Health]
12:40:03 AM
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Geoff Duncan (~1000 words)When Apple announced in June 2005 it was planning to transition its Macintosh computer line to Intel-based processors, the entire Apple community was aghast: a move away from PowerPC would be a historic turning point for the company and its flagship computers. But a tiny portion of the Macintosh community was aghast for different reasons. They were thinking: "Intel processors? What about AMD?!" Well, today at a press event in Mountain View, they got their answer. Wow! Although I should warn my faithful two readers that this is in the April 1 edition of TidBITS.
By geoff@tidbits.com (Geoff Duncan). [TidBITS]
12:13:03 AM
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Saturday, 1 April 2006
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Quite an interesting article on the iPod/iTunes Music Store dominance in which the author concludes that Steve Jobs's control is the key to its current success, and also to its decline as predicted by the author. The argument is essentially that the big guns of Google and Microsoft, or someone like them only have to enter the market at full bore with more open systems to relegate iPod/iTunes to a niche market in the way that Windows did to the MacOS.
We'll see.
My favourite sentence is the last one.
We will witness the creation and destruction of a market
dominance in the time it used to take to work up a business
plan.
[The Age Technology Headlines]
11:53:19 PM
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David Pescovitz:
Scientists at the University of Bristol are studying the "ears" of locusts, membranes that oscillate on the scale of nanometers. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.) They're also measuring the movements of mosquito antennae (seen here) in response to sound. According to the researchers, insights into insect hearing could someday lead to novel microphone technology inspired by nature.
From a press release (photo by D. Robert):
Professor Daniel Robert is the research leader at Bristol: "We have found that different sound frequencies elicit very different mechanical responses in the locust hearing system. By studying these tiny nanoscale movements and understanding how sound waves are turned into mechanical responses we may be able to develop microphones based on the functions of natural hearing. These could detect very faint sounds and analyse their frequency, something that current microphones cannot pick up."
Sounds excellently cool.
Link
[Boing Boing]
5:09:58 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 25/4/06; 10:13:44 AM.
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