December 2007 Archives

As you can no doubt tell, I'm on a week long break as I visit the family in Houston, TX.

My regular posting will resume next week when I get back to Miami, though I will no doubt post the random story here or there as I stumble across it (I can't keep away from the Internet for even a week; I'm so weak!)

Until then, Happy Holidays to everyone!

Benazir Bhutto, chief Pakistani opposition leader, former Prime Minister and vocal critic of General Musharraf's recent actions, was assassinated today:

Ms. Bhutto, 54, was shot in the neck or head, according to differing accounts, as she stood in the open sunroof of a car and waved to crowds. Seconds later a suicide attacker detonated his bomb, damaging one of the cars in her motorcade, killing more than 20 people and wounding 50, the Interior Ministry said.

News of her death sent angry protesters swarming the emergency ward of the nearby hospital, where doctors declared Ms. Bhutto dead at 6:16 p.m. Supporters later jostled to carry her bare wooden coffin as it began its journey to her hometown, Larkana, in southern Pakistan, for burial. In Karachi and other cities, frenzied crowds vented their rage, blocking the streets, burning tires and throwing stones.

A nuclear power has the head of the army declare martial law, oust their Supreme Court Justices, flout democratic rule, and then the opposition leader is assassinated while leaving a political rally... This is what should be getting attention, not Iran.

Oh, that's right, admitting the situation's bad in Pakistan would entail The White House admitting they made a grave error in trusting and aiding Musharraf. Silly me, thinking The White House would admit to their mistakes.

I stumbled upon Janet D. Stemwedel's (of ScienceBlogs) foray into building gingerbread houses using sustainable building design practices. The gingerbread house was for the Bake for a Change contest.

Unfortunately, the Flickr group only has one contestant's entries. I'm really excited to see other contestants' entries, though.

This is wonderfully funny, but the explanation is complex. Ready? Peter Sellers, orating the lyrics to a Hard Day's Night by the Beatles, in the style of Laurence Olivier's "Now is the winter of our discontent" monologue from Shakespeare's Richard III on 1964's TV program entitled Music of Lennon and McCartney. Got it? No? Oh, just watch:

Holy crap that makes for a lot of tags on this post.

Via Kottke.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report will be returning in January, sans writers if the strike isn't over by then, says Comedy Central:

'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and 'The Colbert Report' will resume production on January 7 with both shows returning to air that night without their respective writing staffs. The January 7 return follows a scheduled two-week, end-of-year hiatus that was previously built into the shows' production calendars. We continue to hold out hope for a swift resolution to the current stalemate that will enable the shows to be complete again.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.

Well, it certainly won't be the same, but dear goodness at least we won't have to entertain thoughts of kidnapping Jon Stewart in order to get our fill of wry, witty campaign commentary.

Many of you out there are getting ready to fly for the holidays (or perhaps have already done so) so this list of "five ways to get an edge over other air travelers" might prove helpful.

I've used #3 myself:

3) Playing contract lawyer can be fun.

Though the rules that govern your ticket aren’t pre-printed on your boarding pass, you’re still bound by them. So bring a copy! Since I usually travel with a laptop, I keep a downloaded copy of the airline’s contract of carriage on the hard drive. The contract includes rules such as compensation for being bumped and the infamous “Rule 240″ that lives on in some contracts, governing the transferability of your itinerary to another airline in case of delay. (Knowing the real reason for delays is useful, too.) I also keep screenshots (or PDFs) of terms & conditions pages related to upgrades, frequent flyer mile redemption, etc., in case anyone gives me a hard time. Know your rights, and exert them. I’ve had to break out that legal mumbo jumbo with airline representatives (and their supervisors) on a few occasions, and with paperwork at the ready, I’ve always won.

A few tips I've found in my many years of air travel:

1. Be ready for the security gate: This means a few things. Wear shoes that are easy to take off and put back on. Try to avoid wearing a belt if possible. Skip the jewelry - you can do without it on one flight and it's annoying should it set off the detector. Move your change to a pocket in your carry on bags. Make sure that if you're travelling with a laptop or games console in your carry-ons (you should NEVER check these in, for fear of damage) that they're easily accessible - you'll have to take them out and put them in the x-ray machine separately. Have a photo ID easily accessible with your boarding pass.
2. Check your liquids: If you're taking or bringing back liquids like wine (or in my case, Japanese soy sauce from a grocery store near home) make sure you have a bag that you can check-in to put them in. Check all your carry-ons for liquids or gels, this includes hand creams, toothpaste, everything. If it's over 2.5 ounces, put them in the check-in bag. If they're less than 2.5 ounces, put them all into one small plastic zip up bag. Oh, and if you're putting liquids into your check-in bags, be sure to put them in a zip-up bag and surround them with soft padding (like clothes); opening your checked-in bags only to find a wine soaked mess could ruin any holiday.
3. Be nice to the clerks: You won't get anywhere if you're a jerk. Be nice to the clerks and security personnel. I always say "Hello," "Have a nice day," ask them how their day's been (and be attentive at the response and add to it so they know you listened to them) and sprinkle copious amounts of "Yes, Sir" and "Yes, Ma'am" into your responses (though that's the Texan in me, but it works.) You'll be amazed how much more headway you'll make with requests here and there if they see you as a nice person. Few people are nice to them that day, so they'll open up to you.
4. Dress to impress: I always fly dressed up as if I'm going somewhere important. I'm not talking black-tie here, I'm talking a nice dinner with friends dressed up. If you look like you're important and have somewhere to be, people are more likely to be nice. This is specially important if you're likely to be racially profiled like I am. I also like meeting people at the airport, specially the international terminals, so looking nice is a good way to get them to open up and talk.
5. Bring a copy of your ticket receipts: Many of us do e-tickets nowadays. Make sure to bring a copy of your confirmation e-mails and receipts. If you're environmentally conscious and don't want to kill trees for an e-ticket (like me), make sure you have copies of the documents on your laptop or iPhone (or other portable device.) I've had to pull out the receipt for a ticket dispute and it saved my spot on the flight.
6. Try not to check-in bags: Take a look at what you're packing. Do you really need it? Chances are you could pack a lot less. You generally only need one dress set of clothes and a couple of jeans and a 2-3 shirts/tops to carry you over the holidays. If you can find a way to slim down to just a carry-on suitcase and a backpack, do it. You'll thank yourself by avoiding the check-in lines and skipping the conveyor belt after your flight. I intentionally limit myself to carry-ons only unless I really need to cart around liquids (which have to be checked in), and that's the only excuse I give myself.
7. Keep your passport current: Even if you have no plans to travel outside the country, it's always a good idea to keep your passport current. You never know when a last minute opportunity to go on a cruise or trip comes up. It'd be a shame to miss it because you had to wait over a month to get your passport.
8. Know your Frequent Flyer Number: If you don't have one, get one anyways, even if you rarely fly. Frequent Flyer numbers help cut through a good bit of red tape if you have to call the airline and correct issues (I once had a flight cancelled on me, and as the plane emptied and everyone headed for the massive lines at the ticket counter to wait to change their tickets, I merely called the airline, gave them my frequent flyer number, asked for the next flight available and was done rebooking by the time people had finished lining up in the back of the line, allowing me to calmly walk past the crowd and sit down to relax with a book.) You'd also be surprised how your miles add up (though most airlines now require you to fly at least once every 18 months to keep your balance from expiring.)
9. Get your free meals: Speaking of cancelled flights, if your flight gets cancelled or rescheduled and you're stuck at the airport, don't be afraid to ask the agents at the counter for meal vouchers, or even hotel stay compensation. I've gotten a few free meals this way when I've had to reschedule my flight. These vouchers are usually valid at any food provider in the airport.
10. Keep your boarding pass: Once you get home, file away your boarding passes from the flight. This is the paranoid in me, but you can always use a record of where you've been, and flight boarding passes will aid you in that endeavour.

ForeignPolicy.com has a list of the top 10 foreign policy stories you may have missed (if you're not a foreign policy nut like some of us.)

Number 1? The beginning of the cyberwars:

The year 2007 will be remembered as the beginning of the cyberwars. In late April, Western experts were caught off guard when a barrage of cyberattacks emanating from Russia crippled the banking, police, and government offices of Estonia. Many called it the world's first full-scale cyberinvasion. Then in June, Pentagon officials accused the Chinese military of hacking into a computer network used by top aides to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Near the end of the year, Britain's MI5 intelligence service sent a confidential letter to the CEOs of major multinationals warning them that the Chinese army was probing the cyberdefenses of their companies.

This emerging threat may explain why in September the U.S. Air Force quietly decided to form a Cyberspace Command. The new Cyberspace Command, due to become fully operational by October 2009, will be charged with helping to guard against such threats.

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the US Military to form a command centre to take care of cyber-threats. So far, such defense had lain in the hands of intelligence gathering agencies like the NSA or CIA, that, while they have expertise in security issues, don't have the resources needed for full on network and computer infrastructure maintenance and defence. They're intelligence gathering services, after all, not defence agencies.

The questions that comes up is: will the Air Force seek to recruit some of the best qualified people to work as these cyberwarriors? I ask this because some of the best people are former black-hat hackers (black-hat refers to malicious hackers) that have turned their knowledge of systems penetration tactics into a skill set in the securities consulting business. Somehow, I think the Air Force would find that pill a little hard to swallow with their attitude tests and psychological profiling.

Update: I forgot the link to the ForeignPolicy.com article. It's now been added. Way to forget the basic premise, Ed.

NASA has coined galaxy 3C321 the "Death Star," so named because the black hole at its center is sending a huge jet of energy at another galaxy close by, punching into the fabric of that neighbouring galaxy:

"We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy like we're seeing here," said Dan Evans, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the leader of the study. "This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling."

Being targeted by a jet of high energy particles emitting gamma and X-ray radiation might suck for a galaxy, but it's been suggested that the injection of energy and mass into the smaller galaxy might eventually encourage the formation of new planets and star systems in the target galaxy. A galactic Phoenix effect, if you will.

Update: One of my friends asked me how a jet of radiation could be escaping a black hole and slamming into another galaxy beside it, so I replied with the following mini Astrophysics lesson I thought ya'll might find interesting, in case you have the same question:

Only when you cross the event horizon near the black hole can energy or matter not escape from it. Since black holes are massive gravitational sinkholes, they pull everything around them towards them. This causes massive amounts of matter to be compressed near the black hole, some of this matter reacts because of the presence of other trapped matter and the tremendous compression that goes on and therefore creates massive amounts of radiation.

All this happens both inside and outside the event horizon. The radiation produced outside the event horizon, given enough energy, can escape the gravitational anomaly of the black hole and travel away from it.

An organised jet stream of radiation is a result of the organisation and rotation of the matter caused by the gravitational anomaly surrounding the black hole. It's like a shaped funnel in space.

Chez Pim has some beautiful unfiltered photos taken with disposable cameras by local residents of Lesotho:

We sent a whole bunch of disposable cameras to Lesotho a few weeks ago, and asked the children, teachers, and farmers participating in the program to take photos of their daily lives. We wanted them to help us document their lives and their stories, to bridge the distance, physical or otherwise, between us. When we got the cameras back and developed the films, we were completely swept away by the power of those images. Unlike photographs filtered by the professional eye, these came from the perspective of the people there. They are showing us a bit of their world, from their own point of view.

The cameras were sent as part of awareness raising in conjunction with the Menu For Hope program:

Menu for Hope is an annual fundraising event in support of the UN World Food Programme. Five years ago, the devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia inspired me to find a way to help, and the very first Menu for Hope was born. In 2006, Menu for Hope raised US$60,925.12 to help the UN World Food Programme feed the hungry.

Each year, food bloggers from all over the world join forces to host the Menu for Hope online raffle, offering an array of delectable culinary prizes. For every US$10, the donor receive a virtual raffle ticket toward a prize of their choice.

Reuters has released their slideshow of the 2007 "Pictures of the Year." It's always amazing to see how much can happen in one year.

WARNING: The link resizes your window. I really, really hate it when websites resize my window. It's incredibly bad interface design. Leave my window how I want it, damn it. You're not the only tab open in my window, so hands off!

Saddam Hussein's massive, lavishly furnished yacht is up for sale for a cool $34m:

The Middle Eastern despot-chic decor features plenty of gold, silver, and marble, Arabesque arches, fancy fountains, gold-tap bathrooms, table and silverware for 200, a medi-clinic with surgical suite (who wants to play doctor?), helipad, 14 cabins for 28 passengers, bunk space for 35 crew members, and—because god made this all possible—prayer rooms.

And because the former dictator had reason to be paranoid, the boat has bulletproof glass, closed-circuit television, storage space for a large cache of weapons, including heavy machine guns and surface-to-air missiles, and a secret passage that runs the length of the boat for easy access to a fast patrol boat and a mini-submarine pod for emergency exits.

Hit the link for photos on board.

I apologise for the lack of updates recently. I was unable to log into the administration area of the blog for a couple of days, and I spent a good amount of time trying to resolve that issue myself.

I found out today that it was caused by my web hosts upgrading their server software. Since Movable Type isn't completely portable to all OS's, this broke the administration scripts.

Luckily, my web hosting company, Total Choice Hosting, has a great tech support department, so they got my blog back up and running with a few code modifications within a couple of hours after I told them of the issue.

In case any of you out there run into the same issue with your hosts, I'm told the solution is to add the following code into /lib/MT/Bootstrap.pm:

$ENV{'MT_HOME'} = '/home/username/path-to/cgi-bin/mt';

I had tried a similar solution, but apparently in the wrong cgi files. Thanks, Total Choice. I've gotten nothing but good service from them, and they have active MT users among the administration, so it helps a great deal that they know how to help us MT users.

I should be back to my regular posting schedule by tomorrow.

I'm not sure how credible the story is, but apparently a couple of fishermen found a deer swimming 1.5 miles away from shore. They brought the poor tired animal onto the boat and released it back on shore.

Now that's a "catch of the day" story.

The UK is banning Katanas after a series of murders, injuries and other crimes involving the Samurai swords. The penalties for posession or sale of Katanas (and presumably also Wakizashis and Tantos) will involve a minimum sentence of 6 months in jail and £5,000.

Authentic collectors item Katanas are exempt from the legislation.

Some amazing video of a cool little Japanese toy called ロクロク(Lokuloku) that can be completely squashed down to a flat puddle and will return to its original shape in seconds:

They're available for about $3 in Japan. Want.

Via Gizmodo Japan.

The title sequence for the movie The Kingdom has a surprisingly good recap of the history of Saudi-US relations:

I agree with this YouTube commenter:

Yeah, this is a nice, quick Hollywood recap of some of the history...Can you imagine the impact of production quality like this on educational films? Kids would start loving history class.

Indeed.

Via Kottke.

AOL News has come up with a really funny commercial that shows us YouTube celebrities as they would appear in the real world:

Nice job, AOL.

AVClub has a list of 23 songs that should never be covered again, including perennials "Born to be Wild," "I Melt With You," "One," and "Imagine."

What really caught my ears, however, is the really awesome cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by Devo that I like even more than The Rolling Stones' original version. It has this crazy monotone yet energetic feel to it that lends a completely new twist to the song:

One of the local blogs that discusses transit and planning issues for my city recently published a post about one thing they might like to see on our sea wall, since we have so many of them, downtown where the museum park would be: the Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia

I think it would be absolutely beautiful to go out at dusk or when the tide comes in at night and sit and eat a medianoche and listen. Though usually the waves in Miami aren't that strong, I imagine engineers would be able to figure out a way to make it work.

If not that, then maybe they built a track into a stadium or something and have some racing events downtown

(hint, it's 6min30sec of double-decker bus racing)

SPOILER ALERT! For those that haven't seen Lost in Translation, or for those that prefer mysterious endings, this video is a spoiler. Otherwise, keep on reading.

In the final scene of the movie, Bob Harris whispers something to Charlotte as they embrace in a crowded Tokyo street. The whisper is meant to be so soft that your mind wonders and imagines what was said.

Due to the magic of digital audio manipulation, a YouTube user has revealed the final whisper's content:

Via: Kottke.

A great cry of pain escaped through my lips as I read this letter from Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors:

Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke".

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)

-Terry Pratchett

PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

Terry Pratchett is the author of the excellent, satirical, histerical, and witty Discworld series of novels.

The 2007 Merriam-Webster "Word of the Year" is (drum roll please):

w00t.

That's right folks, a l337 speak word has made it into the Word of the Year list. For those that are technology or l337 deficient, I'll let CBS explain:

"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness.

I never thought "w00t" could sound so sterile.

Guilty admission: I've been known to exclaim "w00t!" out loud in real life when happy. Yes, I know I'm a dork, thank you very much.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007 [Merriam-Webster]

I heard a piece on NPR a little while ago about the a new installation entitled Movable Type at The New York Times headquarters, and finally got around to finding the web site for the installation, which has more pictures.

Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. [It is] a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms [are] used to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to NYTimes.com (browsing, searching, commenting). The resulting refracted view of The Times [is] displayed on 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens installed in the lobby.

I love the real time display of snippets of stories coupled with the old sounds of a newsroom. In this digital day and age, the newsroom is eerily quiet compared to those noisy, busy news rooms you see in movies. Movable Type brings some of that hectic heyday back into the headquarters of The NYT. The installation continually plays the sounds of old typewriters, printing machines and teletype machines as it displays the random snippets from the stories of the day.

I'll definitely visit next time I'm in NYC.

Modern Toilet in Taipei serves food on toilet shaped bowls, and has toilets for seats:

The money quote:

"It's newfangled and funny, we've never eaten on toilets before, even at home!"

What, you don't eat on your home's toilets?

Via: Trifter.

It always annoys me to no end when a scientific study comes to bad conclusions based on incomplete data, and it makes it even worse when the reporting is just as bad in not criticising the flaws in the conclusions.

Such was the case today with a new study that is making the rounds, and I learned of from PhysOrg. The title of the article says it all: "In fruit flies, homosexuality is biological but not hard-wired."

I braced myself for bad science, and there it was:

To test this, he and his colleagues genetically altered synapse strength independent of GB, and also fed the flies drugs that can alter synapse strength. As predicted, they were able to turn fly homosexuality on and off -- and within hours.

"It was amazing. I never thought we'd be able to do that sort of thing, because sexual orientation is supposed to be hard-wired," he said. "This fundamentally changes how we think about this behavior."

Basically, the scientists in the study found that if they genetically or chemically altered certain types of synapse activity within a fly's brain, they could "turn homosexuality on/off."

The data showed that otherwise heterosexual flies would start courting indiscriminately if this specific synapse strength was altered, and that's the key part of the data, barely hinted at by only one sentence in the article amidst the sensationalism:

"Homosexual courtship might be sort of an 'overreaction' to sexual stimuli," he explained.

I say hint because the data did not include tests on naturally homosexual flies. There was no control for the experiment and no negative test. This makes their conclusions fallacious and sensationalist.

The conclusion they can draw from the data is that when certain synapse strengths are modified, flies become hyper-sexual and display a tendency to mate indiscriminately in regards to sex. This hyper sexual behaviour fades when the synapses return to normal, and heterosexual flies again assert a preference for mating with the opposite gender.

The conclusion that they can turn homosexual behaviour on and off at will is bad science, and it really grinds my gears.

Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter from the NYTimes.

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

“Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room,” said Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the lead author of the flu study.

It's those damn kids, I tell you.

“We know one of the largest factors is kids in school — most of the major epidemics are traced to children,” said Dr. Jonathan McCullers, a flu researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “But that still does not explain wintertime. We don’t see flu in September and October.”

As for the crowding argument, Dr. McCullers said, “That never made sense.” People work all year round and crowd into buses and subways and planes no matter what the season.

Okay, maybe not. How about guinea pigs? They're kinda like children, except you can experiment with guinea pigs.

By varying air temperature and humidity in the guinea pigs’ quarters, they discovered that transmission was excellent at 41 degrees. It declined as the temperature rose until, by 86 degrees, the virus was not transmitted at all.

The virus was transmitted best at a low humidity, 20 percent, and not transmitted at all when the humidity reached 80 percent.

The animals also released viruses nearly two days longer at 41 degrees than at a typical room temperature of 68 degrees.

On top of that, the cold air helps the virus to stay viable and the dry air helps them remain in the air because they're in respiratory droplets.

What can you do? The researcher recommends a flu shot. I'll personally be taking antibiotics to protect me against children.

Via MAKE Magazine, a better mousetrap:

Using everyday household objects like a clear drinking glass, metal springs, paper clips, and a metal nut, this "friendlier" mousetrap won't kill off your rodent infestation, but instead will just provide an easy way for you to transport them outside. The designer's intent is that you can re-use the objects after you catch the mouse. I think I would probably wash them a few hundred times first.

I much prefer this method. I don't kill any pests that I find; instead I usually pick them up and place them outside, and then try to find and eliminate the reason they came in in the first place so that they don't return.

Top Gear reviews the the tiniest of cars, the 1964 Peel P50: