Aaaaaahhhhh!! My eyes! My ears!

Curse you, CUJoe!

Find out why here. To paraphrase Bill Cosby: those of you with or without theses, you'll understand.

Bloody hell. I waited a few weeks to upgrade to Firefox 1.5 (MacOSX), because I know from bitter experience that every single time the bloody thing is upgraded, something breaks. I figure the early adopters run interference for me. Well, it appears I have to wait even longer -- it took about five minutes after upgrading for me to run in to Bug 298502, which is where you get the Beachball of Death and have to force-quit the second (but not the first) time you try to use a drop-down from the bookmarks toolbar. It seems to have been around since June, so that must have been on 1.0.x builds, but I'm back on 1.0.7 now and it's not happening. Gaaaah.

Alistair Cooke is sorely missed since his death last year, and never more so than now, as the story breaks that his corpse was defiled:

The bones of Alistair Cooke, one of the great broadcasters of the twentieth century, were stolen days after he died last year at the age of 95, according to reports in New York.

Cooke's bones were removed by a surgeon and then sold for around $7,000 (GBP4,000) to two companies that provide tissue for transplant operations, said The Daily News.

I don't know what Cooke's beliefs were, but I do know that he had his family break the law by scattering his ashes in Central Park -- so I rather think he'd have been amused by all this, and I wish he could somehow be here to send in one of his wry Letters From America about it. (I don't mean to say it's funny -- it's ghoulish and astonishing and vile, of course -- but I can almost hear him making droll humour from the horror, and all in that lovely voice.)

The caption reads, "Each prayer tassel hung on the pickets at the Department of Official Morality represents a visitor's hope for honest government or a corrupt official's atonement," and my first thought is, "so few?"

The Tao of Bush, Morgon Mae Schultz, Utne.com, via Eliot.

Prof B has the goods, and because I'm busy I'm just going to swipe her whole post. Watch out for that first link if you're squeamish, it's a post-op picture of a mastectomy.

This is what breast cancer is about.

Here's a place to start doing research on the latest news related to breast cancer: disease, diagnosis, treatment.

Here is an animated explanation of how to do self-exams. Do them. If, like me, you forget, order yourself a free shower card to help remind you.

October 21 is National Mammography Day. Call and schedule a mammography for yourself. And/or encourage your wife, sister, girlfriend, daughter, to do so.

Wanna donate to breast cancer research or activism? Think Before you Pink.

That's my girl.

Matthew Baldwin is a genius:

Speaking of this, you know what I think they should do? I think they should make it so if you press an elevator button that's already lit, it goes off. This would serve two purposes.

First, it would allow a rider to cancel a button pressed in error.

Second, it would thwart those A-personality types who enter the elevator and press the button for their floor even when it's already lit. This would obviously be the greatest boon of the technology, because, as we all know, those people are totally fucking annoying.

The "this" link goes to a post on Matt's other blog, Tricks of the Trade (which I just added to the blogroll because it, too, is sheer genius). Apparently there's a way to get most elevators to go straight to your floor without stopping for anyone else; evil, but useful.

There's a whale wandering around the Pacific on his/her own, calling in a voice unlike any other whale's. Not much info to be had; here's the whole article by Rhiannon Edward in the Scotsman (the story is from the Dec 11 issue of New Scientist but it's not in the online version):

A LONE whale with a mysterious voice that matches no other species has been discovered roaming the Pacific, it was revealed yesterday.

The whale has been wandering across the ocean for the past 12 years. Researchers identified it after listening to recordings made by the United States Navy’s submarine-tracking hydrophones.

Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, used the partly declassified records to trace the movements of whales in the north Pacific. They show that one whale singing at a frequency of about 52 hertz has cruised the ocean every autumn and winter since 1992.

Its calls do not match those of any known species, though they are clearly those of a baleen, the family that includes blue, fin and humpback whales.

Blue whales typically call at frequencies between 15 and 20 hertz. They do use some higher frequencies, but not 52 hertz, New Scientist magazine reported.

The tracks of the lone whale also do not match the migration patterns of any other species.

New Scientist reported: "Over the years, the calls have deepened slightly, perhaps because the whale has aged, but its voice is still recognisable. Ms Daher doubts that the whale belongs to a new species, although no similar call has been found anywhere else, despite careful monitoring."

Whales of most species spend considerable time alone, so a solitary whale is not unusual, and even if though this one has never been recorded together with any other calls that doesn't mean he/she is always alone. Nonetheless, it's difficult to resist anthropomorphising and feeling sad for the poor lonely whale with the odd high-pitched voice. (Updated 041210. Abstract in Deep Sea Research is here.)

Top: yours truly scrapes 65-million-year-old matrix away from a Triceratops prorsus bone (femur, I think). That made my day. Bottom: the spousal unit in touch with her inner 12-year-old. That contraption (around and through which, on intricate wire trackways and scaffolds, large metal ball bearings continually drop, roll and loop) is apparently a childhood favourite.

I'd link to del.icio.us, which is an online bookmarks manager that I've been playing with and quite liking, only there'd be no point. It fails to load at least as often as it works. My guess is that their server/s is/are badly overloaded. What good is a bookmark service that works half the time?

Next I'm going to try spurl, which even allows you to interface with del.icio.us (when it's working, that is). It doesn't seem to be much more reliable at first glance though. Right now it's churning away trying to load in the next browser tab, but not getting anywhere. Oh wait -- it's finally loaded. Well, better that than timing out like del.icio.us, but it's still not much use if I just want to grab a bookmark and move on without having to wait for something else to load.

Dammit, until I played with these things I didn't even know I wanted an online bookmarks manager. Bah.

I keep wondering, where is all the alternative energy research and development? I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I can't help feeling that the West is not pursuing the subject with appropriate vigour. When I visited Kuwait in 2002, it struck me that here was a country with buckets of oil money and not much else -- except, you know, wind, tides, sunlight and vast empty spaces. If I were Kuwait, I thought at the time, I'd be working and investing my ass off in order to own energy production once the oil starts to run out.

What brought this to mind was the concurrence of a story about an exhibition of ecofriendly cars in Shanghai (google "Habo Shanghai" after that yahoo link dies) and this entry on WorldChanging about a meeting between Kofi Annan and Lu Yongxiang, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences:

...this would be of only passing interest except for the comment from an unnamed Chinese official:

"China will send experts to train local technicians in African countries, and will also host training classes and sponsor African experts to learn in China about agriculture, water power and renewable energies". (Emphasis mine.)

China is clearly making renewable energy technologies a big part of its thrust to be a global power. Africa and other poor areas are terrific test-beds for Chinese renewable R&D, as system which would not be competitive in western markets can still find eager users. As Chinese renewable technologies get better, expect to see their target audience move from African aid to global consumers.

It seems a bit unscrupulous to be using poor nations as testing grounds, but then if the new tech is provided as aid any benefit it brings is a net plus. The strategy makes sense, and also makes me wonder how the world's power balance will start to shift once dwindling supplies finally force us all off the fossil fuel teat.

Murphy's Law is a wonderful thing, and so is this article about it by Nick T. Spark. Learn why everything you think you know about Murphy's Law is wrong, and what rocket sleds have to do with it, and how the fearless and deeply human medic who made it popular may, with Ralph Nader's help, have saved your life.

The article is from the Annals of Improbable Research (which has its own blog) by way of this AIR column in the Guardian. (via Sisyphus Shrugged; scroll down) The photos, which I swiped from the AIR article, belong to Edwards Air Force Base and show Capt John Paul Stapp, who turns out to be rather more interesting than Ed Murphy.

What the spousal unit said. Flexcar is aware of the problem, admits it's a problem, and yet doesn't fix it (they've been around since 1999, and I don't suppose that this summer is the first one in which the card readers have crapped out). That doesn't sound like a company that wants my business, which is just as well since they won't be getting any more of it until they can guarantee me I won't be left stranded if I park the damn car in the sun.

Flying Phil Rabinowitz streaks into the record books as the fastest centenarian so far: 100 meters in 30.86 seconds! He has actually run under 30 seconds but there was a clock malfunction so that time is not official.

I'm going to break this record. I'm serious. You wait and see if I don't.

(Photo: Esa Alexander/Reuters)

I've had it with Ureach. Their free email sucks -- it's a spam magnet with no filtering capacity to speak of, and anyway mine has simply stopped working this morning -- and their intrusive attempts to get me to pay for the "full" version ensure that I will never do so. (My favourite -- "we've upgraded you for free, all the features will go away in two weeks so pay up!". The "features" were shouse anyway.)

So I'm looking for an email service. I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount, although I'm not really sure what constitutes "reasonable" in this context -- a hundred dollars a year? A couple of hundred? Anway, features:

• web based, of course


• some kind of SpamGard that keeps the more obvious bulk mail at bay and learns by allowing me to define something as spam -- and get rid of it -- with a single click; unlike Ureach's version, this should actually work and keep my inbox relatively free of crap


• several Mb of space, the more the merrier


• the ability to archive when space fills up (I keep, for instance, every email between the spousal unit and myself)


• said archive to be in a database format so that I don't have a series of humongous textfiles to deal with; something compatible with, say, Eudora, or Communicator (does that even still exist?), or -- well, anything really, but ideally with a downloadable version of the webmail app


• decent address book -- meaning easy to add addresses to the file, easy to add recipients from the file when composing mail


• ability to organise stored mail into folders (bite me, Google)


• No advertisements. None, ever.


• POPmail, and ability to retrieve mail from other POP accounts


• catch-all addressing, so that I can sign things as "senn-Fredsblog@wherever.whatever" to see whether Fred is selling addresses


• decent search function (once more, Ureach, you suck)


• decent range of customisation in re: layout, format of messages, attachments, and so on -- or, you know, one unalterable layout that happens to match all my preferences


• "send copy to self" that actually does, that is, works like a bcc:; none of this bizarro "it's in the Sent folder and you can't ever move it" bollocks (Novell Groupwise, you virus masquerading as software, I'm looking at you); likewise, no symbolic linking, if I move something I want it moved already

That's about all I can think of for now. The easiest way to do all this would be to buy a minimal hosting package from a company with a decent webmail app, but all the webmail-with-hosting I've ever seen was utter crap. All info and advice much appreciated.

Yesterday and today, I spent about half an hour deleting (by hand; MT is nice, but it lacks some sorely needed functionality) some of the most vile comment spam I've seen. Rape, incest and bestiality are this scumbag's specialties, according to the comment titles and links. A WHOIS lookup on the domains entered in the url field gives this:

OrgName: Atrivo
OrgID: ATRIV
Address: 180 Golf Club Road #118
City: Pleasant Hill
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94523
Country: US

NetRange: 69.50.160.0 - 69.50.191.255
CIDR: 69.50.160.0/19
NetName: ATRIVOTECHNOLOGIES
NetHandle: NET-69-50-160-0-1
Parent: NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: MAIL.ATRIVO.COM
NameServer: PAVEL.ATRIVO.COM
Comment:
Comment: ## Comments listed here will appear in ARIN's WHOIS database.
RegDate: 2003-06-04
Updated: 2003-08-21

NOCHandle: EKA4-ARIN
NOCName: Kacperski, Emil
NOCPhone: +1-925-550-3947
NOCEmail: emil@atrivo.com

OrgTechHandle: EKA4-ARIN
OrgTechName: Kacperski, Emil
OrgTechPhone: +1-925-550-3947
OrgTechEmail: emil@atrivo.com

The OrgTechHandle entry is another WHOIS link, which gives:

Name: Kacperski, Emil
Handle: EKA4-ARIN
Company: Atrivo
Address: 180 Golf Club Road #118
City: Pleasant Hill
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94523
Country: US
Comment:
RegDate: 2002-12-09
Updated: 2002-12-09
Phone: +1-925-550-3947 (Office)
Email: emil@atrivo.com

A google search turns up around a hundred hits, including this, this and this.

Does your mother know what you do for a living, you pustule on the asshole of humanity?

Got some comments spam last night; the weird part is, the spousal unit renamed all the cgi scripts after obscure comedians, so how did I get hit? Was it some dork sitting up all night spamming by hand? Anyway, add 80.132.74.114 to your blacklist.

I've been seeing this all over the place, most recently at Pharyngula, and meaning to play along:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.

"This produces lymphocytes, each bearing a distinct receptor, so that the total repertoire of receptors can recognize virtually any antigen."

The antecedent of "this" is recombination of variable receptor gene segments and clonal selection of lymphocytes; the sentence is from Janeway, Travers, Walport and Shlomchik, Immunobiology 5th edition 2001 (Garland ISBN 0-8153-3642-X). If you want a good introduction to immunology, you can't go past this book; it really is first class. Both text and figures present a clear, concise but comprehensive and superbly well organised overview of the field. Highly recommended. You can see for yourself here at the NCBI Bookshelf, although you'll need to come up with searches (base 'em on the chapter headings is the easiest way) because there's no way to browse.

You know I love me some Margaret Cho, right? Well, now she and "explorer, genius, conquerer, artist, muse, refugee, eternal beauty, sexual scientist" Ava Stander are selling clothes:

We are not a plus-sized clothing line. Nor do we make clothes for the super skinny. Right now, our styles fit sizes 10 - 18, which encompasses the majority of women. In success, we will add sizes. In the mean time, we would like to point the spotlight back in to the faces of the mainstream media that is creating impossible standards of thinness for women. These unrealistic yardsticks seemed to appear at the same time women were gaining unprecedented power in the work place; as if it was known that women consumed with dieting and glamour would be less likely to take jobs away from men. Very quickly women previously not considered overweight were considered fat and the ideal woman went from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy and Kate Moss. We would like to move the weight standards for women up a bit and bring back the styles of the 1940's that loved women and their curves instead of hiding and distorting them; back to the time when sexy was Lana Turner, Anita Eckberg, and Mae West, and Miss America weighed 150 pounds.

(via Kip)

Further to the snippet below, Ms Lauren of feministe has received a reply from Virgin to her complaint about the mouth-shaped urinals. Virgin, it seems, are shocked -- shocked! -- that women would be upset by the design, particularly since the offending objects were designed by women. Of course, since women all think alike and no woman could possibly do anything stupid or boorish. Gah.

On the other hand, Virgin is at least listening to customers, and will not be installing the urinals, which is why I thought it only fair to post this update. (picture swiped from Yahoo news)

So I see Martha Stewart was convicted of being rich while female and being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a slack-pizzled pack of political opportunists decided they needed to grab some headlines. Oh, and also of being kind of a bitch. Well, here's some news for you gleeful assholes filling up on Schadenfreude right now: the appeals court is likely to notice that the real charge was thrown out and the remaining ones were a desperate grab at a conviction, any conviction, in a case over fifty thousand dollars and some arrogance. Here's more for that worthless shitsack juror who just couldn't wait for his fifteen minutes: this is not a victory for the little guy, you maggot, it's a scripted take-down for the cameras and you bent right over for the system.

Go ahead, tell me how Martha deserves to do time while this prick hasn't even been charged. Bah. I thought I'd left the Tall Poppy Syndrome behind. (publicity shot swiped from wikipedia article)

Great Old Citrus: that thing is a citron, Citrus medica var. sarcodactylus. Spouse and I couldn't resist it when we saw it at Whole Foods. It's indigenous to the lower Himalayas and has been known for centuries throughout Asia. According to Julia F Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates, it's called fu shou in China, bushukon in Japan, limau jari, jeruk tangan and limau kerat lingtang in Malaya, djerook tangan in Indonesia, som-mu in Thailand and phât thu in Vietnam. The most common English name is Buddha's Hand. It has abundant pith and little or no flesh inside, and is mostly valued for the thick, soft rind, which can be candied or grated and used like lemon zest, and for its decorative value and strong lemony perfume. There's even a Buddha's Hand citron flavoured vodka available. Yum.

Update: there's the innards of the thing, with a medium sized apple for scale. I think this was about an average sized Cthulhu Fruit, although there was one in the shop at least twice as big.
Update the second: I don't know where I got the idea the rind was thick; as you can see in the picture, it's thinner than a lemon's.

.. if I did, I could drive here in my new home without retraining if not for the French, especially Napoleon. Also that Überscheißkopf Hitler. Quelle bastards!

(via Graham)

I only just thought to check whether the Poe Toaster (oh how I wish I'd thought of that) made his visit this year. Sure enough, he did. That link goes to the full version of AP writer Brian Witte's coverage, which (apart from a couple of dismal local attempts) seems to be the only version making the media rounds this year.

more...

In comments on portable music, Ralf writes I guess this won't whet your appetite for the iPod or its little sibling:

During his regular evening walk, software executive Steve Crandall often nods a polite greeting to other iPod users he passes: He easily spots the distinctive white earbuds threaded from pocket to ears.

But while quietly enjoying some chamber music one evening in August, Crandall's polite nodding protocol was rudely shattered.

Crandall was boldly approached by another iPod user, a 30ish woman bopping enthusiastically to some high-energy tune.

"She walked right up to me and got within my comfort field," Crandall stammered. "I was taken aback. She pulled out the earbuds on her iPod and indicated the jack with her eyes."

Warily unplugging his own earbuds, Crandall gingerly plugged them into the woman's iPod [...]

Oh dear Ghod. Don't we have a social contract, and laws, and rules, and mores, specifically to keep us safe from things like this? Get away from me, you freaks!

So I finally saw LotR:RotK, and it sucked. Hard. I'm probably too late to do anyone any good with this, but if you haven't seen it, don't. Jackson treats the characters and the story without respect, pretty much exactly as I'd expected him to do in the first two movies. I was suprised when he exceeded my expectations with FotR and TTT, but the signs were there in some of the egregious abuses of character and plot, and the third movie makes it abundantly clear that Jackson simply does not understand the nature of Tolkien's work. He reduces it to Hollywood pabulum -- Graydon (in this thread) is exactly right when he says, "The generosity has been leeched out of [the story], along with the restraint." Even viewed as schlock RotK is a lousy piece of work. Editing, pacing and visual continuity are all sloppy. The spousal unit postulated time/money problems and/or studio interference, but in the end Jackson must take the blame for turning a grand and epic tale into a stupid action flick.

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When you find that the backlog of those little apple juice boxes that your wife puts in your lunch has almost filled the comestibles fridge at work, do not take them all out and drink them all at once. If you do, you will rumble, bloat and fart for hours; you will shit green slurry until your fundamental orifice puckers in reflexive terror at each fresh gurgle; you will come to believe that angry weasels are eating their way out of your intestines. Got it? Do not gorge on apple juice: it does not love you back.