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Peter Nixon
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Saturday, 29 July 2006
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Electric Sheep at SIGGRAPH. 
Scott Draves' 63-dimensional collectively-crunched mathematical screensaver, Electric Sheep, will be on display at SIGGRAPH starting Sunday. It is not hippie stuff. Check it out. [Paul Boutin]
4:26:26 PM 
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Friday, 28 July 2006
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 I saw this on CNN this morning:
In keeping with her mood and to reflect the world crises she tackles daily, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to play a somber piece of music to her Asian colleagues in Malaysia this week."It is not a time that is frivolous. It is a serious time. I will play something that is in accordance with my serious mood," said Rice, who had just attended a conference in Rome aimed at helping resolve the Lebanon crisis.[~]Rice said she would not be comfortable singing show tunes.
She's working on a piano recital that captures the mood instead of doing her job. That's it, play the right piece of music and everything will be fine. Why am I suddenly thinking of Nero?
(h/t Liberal Catnip)
[Crooks and Liars]
7:05:38 AM
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Thursday, 27 July 2006
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Astronomers at the University of Tasmania have found that the solar system's smallest planet is not getting colder as first thought and it probably does not have rings.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
10:04:19 PM
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As the bikini turns 60, it's entering the electronic age with a new model featuring a built-in alarm to warn wearers to get out of the sun.
[The Age Technology Headlines]
10:00:10 PM
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Mark Frauenfelder:
The Navy's Safety Center website has a fantastic gallery of photos showing people doing foolishly dangerous things.
On the plus side, he is wearing a hard hat. Also, if you look carefully at the boulder's 4 o'clock, you'll see a plastic drink bottle propped on another rock, so he is also staying hydrated. And maybe that boulder is actually 20 feet long, so that's just the tip sticking out. Yeah, that's it.
Link (Thanks, Shawn!)
By noemail@noemail.org (Mark Frauenfelder). [Boing Boing]
9:19:07 PM
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The makers of Monopoly release a new version of the game in which the "cash" is replaced with a Visa-branded debit cards. [The Age Technology Headlines]
8:02:15 AM
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Here's a picture taken over a hundred years ago. Every person in the picture is dead. The person who took the picture is dead. Almost every person who was alive then is dead now. But there they are looking out at you through my weblog. What a strange thing. I wonder what devices a picture of my face will look out from 100 years from now.
Do you know that in Silicon Valley they have parties where someone says to the host that if they invite Dave Winer they won't come. What do you think the people in the picture think about that! Do you think anyone will care 100 years from now? [Scripting News]
7:33:47 AM
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Wednesday, 26 July 2006
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Tuesday, 25 July 2006
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Researchers at a medical conference in Cairns have heard that taking high doses of antioxidants such as vitamin C and E does not protect against heart attacks.
[ABC News: Health]
11:27:23 PM
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David Pescovitz:
Tim Elverston's Cursor kite is a very clever idea. From WindFire Designs:
Quad-line control, asymmetrical framing, invisible stainless fittings, and opposed-bow tensioning for the sail make this incredible kite look digitally pasted right into the sky.
Link (via MAKE: Blog)
 By noemail@noemail.org (David Pescovitz).
[Boing Boing]
11:18:12 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Domain Name Kiting is a new online scam that's pretty fascinating. Under new domain reg rules, you can register a domain for five days without paying for it. Kiters register thousands and thousands of domains and stick ads on them, check to see which ones generate income, and pay to keep those registrations. They can also linkfarm on those domains, using thousands of shifting come-and-go domains to try to trick Google into conferring pagerank on a spam-site. Here's a pretty good explanation of Domain Name Kiting and how it got here:
The AGP is a five-day window period during which a newly registered domain name can be deleted/ dropped with full refund of registration fee. AGP was introduced to provide a mechanism for Registrars and registrants to correct mistakes, reverse fraudulent registrations. Registrars involved in kiting scam, register thousands of domains against the large amount of money they deposit with Registry. Domains registered are usually the expired ones, which have been indexed by search engine giants like Google, Yahoo etc. Appreciable volume of type-in-traffic is received for these domains, which have now been parked, to generate revenue. Domain Parking presents viable option for domainers to generate revenue from their unused domains, by hosting a single page web site with paid advertisement links. Clicks from visitors to such sites, generates money for the domainer.
Link
 (Cory Doctorow)
[Boing Boing]
11:01:50 PM
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 BBC Nature --
Only 56 butterfly species now remain in Britain as others have fallen
victim to disappearing habitat, a charity says. The Butterfly
Conservation charity said urban sprawl, modern farming techniques and
lack of woodland management had all played their part in habitat loss.
Hertfordshire has lost the most species - 17 - in the past century,
with Bedfordshire, Suffolk and Lincolnshire having lost 15 each. The
list has been published ahead of the first Save Our Butterflies week.
Cambridgeshire comes fifth on the "extinction" list, having lost 12
species, followed by Essex which has lost 11. Conservationist Dr Martin
Warren, from the charity, said: "Butterfly species are becoming extinct
county by county. It is deeply worrying. "Butterflies in profusion tell
us that nature is in balance. Where butterflies are disappearing,
nature generally is in trouble." He added: "These extinctions are the
result of habitat loss. That's the result of either urban spread, lack
of woodland management or intensive farming practices." Warwickshire
comes in at seventh in the table with nine species lost, making it the
highest placed county outside of the East of England. Dr Warren said:
"Sadly, these counties in the East of England lack any serious hills
which could have provided a refuge from the plough." The species that
has suffered most county extinctions is the High Brown Fritillary. (07/23/06)
[Synergic Earth News] [The Mediaburn Radio Weblog]
10:58:18 PM
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Arthur:
Even though the catastrophe of Vietnam happened only a moment ago in historic terms, we never understood the lesson. That failure made the catastrophe of Iraq possible, and even inevitable. Since we failed to learn from our terrible error, we would have made the same mistake again, if not in Iraq, then somewhere else. And given the terms in which so many commentators continue to discuss the disaster of Iraq, we still refuse to learn the lesson. We refuse to give up the notion of our "omnipotence," and the idea that we can achieve anything if we only set our minds to it with sufficient willpower, and if we only execute the plan "competently." That has never been true for any people, at any time in history. And it is not true for us. We had better learn the lesson, and learn it soon, or the price we will have to pay may be higher and worse than any of us will care to contemplate[sigma]read on
[Crooks and Liars]
8:15:08 AM
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Monday, 3 July 2006
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Sunday, 2 July 2006
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Australian doctors have seized on a study showing one-third of hospital admissions are avoidable, arguing it underscores the need for preventative medicine.
Surely every dollar spent preventing ill-health saves many more dollars in treatment? Yes?
[ABC News: Health]
10:49:18 PM
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A report by the Australian Council of Smoking and Health reveals that the combination of drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco leads to a greater risk of developing cancer.
Surprise, surprise.
[ABC News: Health]
8:35:47 PM
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David Pescovitz:
This week's New Yorker features an engaging article by Christine Kenneally about hemispherectomy, perhaps "the most radical procedure in neurosurgery." In this procedure, an entire side of the hemisphere is removed as a treatment for cancer or chronic seizures. The incredible thing is that if the hemispherectomy is done when a patient is very young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally. From the New Yorker:
Many children who have had hemispherectomies at Johns Hopkins are in high school, and one, a college student, is on the dean's list. The families of these children can barely believe the transformation, and not so long ago neurologists and neurosurgeons found it hard to believe as well. I asked (neurosurgeon George) Jallo if he remembered his first hemispherectomy. ""Yes and no," he said. "I don't remember the patient. It was more of a 'Wow.' I was a resident in training and I assisted in one of the operations. I didn't realize you could take out that much brain tissue and have someone be so functional and useful in society. What amazes me is that, if someone all of a sudden strokes out half of the brain, more likely than not they are not going to survive. Yet a lot of these people develop their seizures when they're very young, or in utero, and when you take out half of their brain in one sitting it's as if they weren't touched."
There are wide variations in recovery, and any brain surgery carries grave risks. Many factors affect how well a patient does; age at the time of a condition's onset, age at the time of the operation, the nature of the condition itself, and the determination of parents and caregivers to maintain an intense schedule of therapy before and afterward. Possibly the greatest danger is posed by the brain's veins and arteries, which are so numerous and so wildly, individually arranged that they are impossible to map and very hard to control. Excessive bleeding can send patients into shock and then into comas from which they never return, or it can wipe out most brain function. The other conflicting challenge of the surgery is the necessity of making sure that enough tissue is removed. Freeman once saw a small boy who made good progress for six months following a hemispherectomy, after which he began to deteriorate. His doctors discovered that they had left a small piece of the excised hemisphere in the child's head. It was, said Freeman, no larger than the top joint of his thumb. But the electricity from that piece of neural tissue was enough to compromise the remaining hemisphere. The boy had another operation, a 'redo', as the doctors at Johns Hopkins informally call it, in which the bad piece of brain was removed. After that, he had no more seizures.
Link
I wish I had a reference to it (I don't), but I once saw a British TV doco showing three people who had almost no brain at all, each of them functioning quite well in society. The most severe case was a quite brilliant academic I think. The way it worked was thus. Each person had a thin film of brain cells lining the inside of the skull. The rest of the skull was filled with fluid. In spite of this, with a brain perhaps a fiftieth the size of most people's, they performed all human functions we recognise as being performed by the brain. The doco made the point that there were many more cases, but that they are kept from the patients unless they either have to know for some reason, or find out accidentally. All three cases in the doco had found out by accident.
By noemail@noemail.org (David Pescovitz). [Boing Boing]
8:28:13 PM
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Pictures from the prologue in Strasbourg
This will be an amazing tour, given the controversy breaking in the two days before it began. So many favourites out; everything is up in the air.
[BBC Sport | Other Sports | Cycling | World Edition]
12:20:26 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 29/7/06; 4:31:18 PM.
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