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August 30, 2005
The secret of NIMH is now available at the Wistar Institute
In the continuing vein of sceintists-playing-god stories (zombie dogs and monkey brains, we now take you to... Immortal mice?
SCIENTISTS have created "miracle mice" that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.
Well, that's rather cool. Bypassing the better mousetrap, they're breeding better mice, because that's what we need. Expecially in New York. Mice its harder to get rid of...
at the Wistar Institute, a US biomedical research centre
Wait. I thought it was the National Institute of Mental Health that did this stuff. Where's Nicodemus and Brisby?
"We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow," she said. A similar phenomenon was observed when the optic nerve was severed and the liver partially destroyed."It is quite remarkable. The only organ that did not grow back was the brain."
"When we injected fetal liver cells taken from those animals into ordinary mice, they too gained the power of regeneration. We found this persisted even six months after the injection."
So the only way to kill them is to sever their heads and/or destroy their brains. Which is bringing both zombies to mind, and the following scrolling narration... "He cannot die, unless you take his head, and with it his power. In the end there can be only one."
Good god. Just utterly incredible. If it ever makes it to clinical human testing and works this well, the implications are astounding. Arthritis, organ failure, nerve damage, spinal injuries, amputations all gone in one fell swoop.
Incredible.
The researchers believe the same genes could confer greater longevity and are measuring their animals' survival rate. However, the mice are only 18 months old, and the normal lifespan is two years so it is too early to reach firm conclusions.
It really only leaves two things: The quest for world domination and working out how to create such small admantium claws for my army of Wolverine mice.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:43 PM
NeoOffice is looking quite good at the moment
The entirity of yesterday evening was spent writing a commentary on a long, dull proposal for submission today. It was not an experience I would care to repeat, so I was careful to save the document every 10 minutes or so.
However, it's when there's a deadline that the foibles of software become less of a tolerable peccadillo and escalate into something that bodes poorly for the health of the hardware. Microsoft Word (for the Macintosh), which crashes on a semi-regular basis, has one other fault I have just discovered. It gives no indication and issues absolutely no warnings when it fails to save a document to a shared (SMB) drive. It appears, to all intents and purposes, that the document is saved. Until you close Word and look for it.
NeoOffice is the Macified version of OpenOffice, which I intend to download and install today.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:22 AM
August 29, 2005
Dinosaurs.
The American Museum of Natural history has a new special exhibit. For a mere $16, they promise, all you know about dinosaurs will be turned on its head. I roved over the AMNH website, and it looked interesting, with mention of some new biomechanics research that I hadn't read a great deal of.
At this point, I was curious, being somewhat interested in dinosaurs and other pre-Cenozoic beasts. Or at least interested enough to have been in a dig crew for three seasons and believe that methodically breaking very large rocks into very small rocks, all the while examining the rubble with a jeweler’s loop (10x magnifier) for small brown fossil fragments amongst the (brown) coal flecks and (brown) fossilized mud was actually a fun way to spend summers. I did find some dinosaur bits - mostly teeth with the occasional jaw, turtle (lots of turtle), the occasional pterosaur bone and jaw fragments and teeth from a large thing called a labrynthodont, which can be imagined as a Mexican walking fish about fifteen feet long (with curiously formed and sharp teeth).
Quite honestly, I didn't expect to learn anything revolutionary, but I thought it might be fun to check out. I knew it would be targeted at the 6-12 year olds, and I don't think I was too far off the mark. That was fine with me, so long as they had the occasional aside for curious adults.
But there was little information there that wasn't contained in the main halls (often with better and wider ranging examples), and where something wasn't well covered in the main hall, the exact text and multimedia presentations are all available on the AMNH website (which I'd already read). For $16, I had hoped it would offer a little more detail.
What was there was presented well, of course. It simply seemed that they'd roped off a standard exhibit and were charging a premium to be allowed into an area more crowded than average. Good, but not great. However, what really soured me was, nearing the end of the exhibit, in front of a large diorama, was overhearing a curious young boy ask his tour guide a question of one of the mammals represented there.
"That mammal there, it looks like one of the ancestors of whales, I think. Is it?" pointing, as he was, to a shrew-like beagle sized thing (an eomaia, a member of a group that spawned placental mammals). It was a decent question, I thought (albeit 70 million years early), which deserved a good answer. I tend to have a soft spot for quizzical kids. The guide’s response, however, was unbelievably bad, and wrong in so many ways.
"Well, we all came from the ocean, so in a sense, we're all the descendants of whales".
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:58 PM
August 25, 2005
The French (again).
Seldom do I find myself on the side of animal liberation. Today is, however, such an occasion. Brigitte Bardot (who is, admittedly, french) has called on her government to outlaw using certain things as shark bait.
Like live puppies and kittens.
I'm not going to go into all the gruesome details. You can click here if you want them. Be warned, it involves baby animals, sharks, fishing lines and hooks.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:35 PM
After reading "Databases for Dummies"...
Arthur Kirk was arrested on felony weapons charges. No big story there, really. Except that he had a felony on his record already, but still managed to hold an administrative position with the Charlevoix-Emmet Intermediate School District. Which is disturbing.
The school district contracted with Kirk as an AmeriCorps volunteer in 2001, unaware he had a lengthy felony criminal history under the name Arthur Kirkeby. He served more than five years in prison after being convicted in 1981 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving an 8-year-old boy in Macomb County.
But surely the school did background checks? Yes, they did. School officials entered Kirk's name, driver's license number, Social Security number and date of birth into Michigan State Police's Internet Criminal History Access Tool (ICHAT).
Which is a rather cool idea. But...
An Ingham County Probate Court official confirmed Kirkeby legally changed his name to Kirk there in 1985 ... [and] the system keys off a person's name, and no criminal history existed for Arthur Kirk, only for Arthur Kirkeby
And date of birth and SSN and drivers licence don't count toward search results.
The system has since been updated now they know people can change their names. I hope they know social security numbers can change too.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:19 PM
August 24, 2005
Headlines are as nasty as you make them.
But, some, like this, makes it just too easy.
Depp's 'Chocolate Factory' has tasty opening
More than I wanted to know.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:48 PM
In the kingdom of the ballless, the one balled man is king.
PARIS - Faced with yet another report that he cheated his way to a Tour de France victory, Lance Armstrong responded Tuesday the same way he has since the doping whispers began during the first of his seven straight wins: "I never took performance enhancing drugs."
"Oh fuck off, you lying, whiney little toad munchers" would have been less polite, but more apt.
In a four-page article headlined "The Armstrong Lie," the French sports daily L'Equipe printed copies of documents suggesting six urine samples he provided during his first championship in 1999 tested positive for the red blood cell-booster erythropoietin, or EPO.For once, I agree with the title. I think it is lies about Armstrong. They're testing for EPO now, from a six year old sample. It's been frozen. But... EPO, either in its natural state or the synthesized version, is not stable in urine - even when frozen and stored at -20' celsius (-4'f).
And retesting? No, sorry. They can't do that either. The sample has been destroyed/contaminated/the dog ate my homework.
Its more or less an extension of the stuff they've been printing for the last seven years. I had thought they'd stopped when he retired (which they welcomed with "Never to such an extent, probably, has the departure of a champion been welcomed with such widespread relief"), but I suppose you can't underestimate the bitterness that not actaully winning their own race for the last twenty years produced.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:55 AM
August 23, 2005
Must be a hell of a show.
CANTON, Ohio -- There are 490 female students at Timken High School, and 65 are pregnant, according to a recent report in the Canton Repository.The article reported that some would say that movies, TV, videogames, lazy parents and lax discipline may all be to blame.
The last two, I can buy. But videogames, TV and movies? How does that work?
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 04:38 PM
Movable Traps 3.2b
A few problems that I've hit in the last couple of days, and a few suggestions about how to best work around them with few(er) hair tearing moments. File extensions, archive problems and Typekey login problems for comments will be tackled.
Your mileage may vary.
1. File extensions: You can change them from html to php, and many people do. This is wonderful, except where the html page sticks around. Often, the default page is index.html. This is especially problematic when you're updating templates and wondering why nothing seems to work.
Try manually typing in yoururl/index.htm and yoururl/index.php to check this. Remove the html file if this is indeed causing you problems.
2. No way to leave comments (Archive mapping problem): This may not happen for all installations. Under Settings/Publishing/Archive mapping, it will show you what arhcive files will be generated.
In this case, under individual entry, Category Archive and Individual entry archive are being generated in the same place with the same name. Not so good. Individual Entry is selected as preferred, so you might imagine it's the active one of the two. Unfortunately, this isn't the case and it means that it is generated first, and subsequently clobbered by the Category Archive.
There were fairly minimal visual differences between the two templates in this case - with the exception that Category Archives don't allow you to leave a comment. Clicking on the "Comments" link was meant to take you to the Individual Entry where you could post a comment, but as that had been overwritten with the Category archive... Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel. It was impossible to leave comments.
Solution: Delete the Category archive entry from under "Archive Type: Individual" and rebuild.
3. MT3.2b & Typekey Version 1.1: If, after logging in on the Typekey server and returning to the comments page, you are greeted with "Comment Submission Error Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: The sign-in validation failed.", you are experienceing this problem.
If 3.2b is configured with TypeKey V1.1, it needs to get a v1.1 response from the typekey servers to work. But (in some installations) it doesn't actually tell the TypeKey server that it needs that version. TypeKey merrily sends back the standard v1.0 response. Which doesn't work.
Soulution: Edit your Individual Archive Entry template and demand a version 1.1 response, by changing this:
<a href="<$MTRemoteSignInLink static="1"$>"> Sign in</a>
into this
<a href="<$MTRemoteSignInLink static="1"$>&v=1.1"> Sign in</a>
4. TypeKey #2 - Configuration: If you're getting a "TypeKey not configured" error when trying to log in to comment, login to www.typkey.com and check your TypeKey account. Under "YOUR WEBLOG PREFERENCES", the urls you enter should be the server, not your weblog. In my case, it is "http://www.moreblogsofroleplay.com/" rather than "http://www.moreblogsofroleplay.com/Meathe".
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:34 PM
August 19, 2005
Captain America says...
It's just too perfect. I imagine the script thus:
Captain America: Just like Nancy says. Just say no to drugs!
Kid: But, Cap! Didn't you get your super powers after you got dosed up real good by Prof Reinstein? I mean, you must have...
Captain America: Son, that's enough. It was a long time ago. During The War.
Kid: ... had more 'roids than Canseco. Seriously. Off your nut.
Captain America: Fucking kids.
(And, yes, it's a real cover. You can click on the cover to read the entire story about drug dealing aliens who want you to get stoned so they can take over the world. But it's not advised.)
For those wondering why I find this so amusing, the good Captain got all his powers after the 'super soldier serum' was administered intravenously and orally over a period of time. Cap was shooting up long ago. Of course, there was the obligatory radiation added after.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 07:39 PM
Why? Because we can.
Messing about inside Windows XP and I noticed an unusual .ini file lurking in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory called oeminfo.ini, and a corresponding bitmap file, oemlogo.bmp
So I edited it as follows:
[General]
Manufacturer=Insane Seal Enterprises
Model=Alpha
And stuck in a new oemlogo.bmp (the size, after measuring is 140x114). Lo and behold, the System Information panel changes.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:45 PM
I said the next question would not be about string.
But we all make mistakes. For instance, Utopia believes I can sort this one out.
Dr. Meathe, String theory: Universal Unification or Universal crap?
I should like to take a moment to thank both you and Navarre kindly for the warm up questions before we get to the tricky ones.
There is a problem in physics. There are two important branches which are incompatible. One, Relativity, dealing with large objects and distances, and the other, quantum mechanics and the standard model, seem to provide correct answers for almost every tiny thing under almost all conditions. Together, they represent the sum of our physics knowledge, using completely different mathematics, and in their own domain are spectacular. Einstein spent his last years looking for the elusive theory of everything to marry them and could not find it, as they have irreconcilable differences. At some point before the ceremony one or the other always gets cold feet and stages its own kidnapping. The standard model also has a problems in that it has twenty variables that must be hand added to garner the correct answer to a problem, and for it, gravity does not exist.
For centuries, scientists have been trying to reduce everything to the smallest point that everything else is built from. First the atom. Then protons and neutrons. Then quarks. Eeking ever closer to a zero dimensional dot.
Now suppose that approach is all wrong, and that the simplest, smallest object is a string. It's tiny. So tiny its one dimensional. But it’s a string, and it vibrates, much the same as any string on a musical instrument. And the vibrational pattern of a string determines what basic particle (quark, boson, Higgs-boson, Gluon, etc) is created. If you’re religious, you could imagine these strings are all part of god’s harpsichord. It’s a beautiful picture.
With one small problem: One-dimensional objects are Lucifer’s playthings. They do bad things. Casuality (cause-and-effect) doesn’t seem to apply to them and they contradict Relativity’s dictum that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. But we persist, as we have done for in the past (it has been said for light that “Physicists use the wave theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the particle theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.”)
String theory got its start as a way to explain behaviors in particle smashers. Instead of the good, old fashioned 3+1 (time) dimensions that we're all comfortable with, they proposed dimensions past 4, 26 all told, to cover the erratic behaviour of boson particles from certain collisions in particle colliders. For which it worked fairly well, but only covered very specific things (hadron smashers, boson particles). But the world is not solely bosons, so this one really was a one trick pony, needing rethinking for broader applications. And the physicists spoke, and there was a 10 dimensional model and it was good. This became 5 different theories and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Further refined, it became an 11 dimensional version (10 of space, 1 time), also known as M-theory - combining all 5 previous 10 dimensional theories (this the currently favoured model). The ‘M’ variously stands for Mother, Magic, Mystery, Matrix, Murky and Membrane. When they figure out the theory completely, they’ll probably know what the M means.
One theory to bring them all, and in the darkness tie them
Or such is the intent. String theory is an elegant solution. If the standard model is modified to use one dimensional strings instead of points, the number of hand added variables drops from 20 to 1. And that one is the length of strings. It also explains gravity.
Not that it is without it’s own problems. Sheldon Glashow (Nobel Prize winner, Physics, 1979), though he does admit the elegance of the theory, he points at the glaring hole in the middle. “The string theorists have a theory that appears to be consistent and is very beautiful, very complex, and I don’t understand it. It gives a quantum theory of gravity that appears to be consistent but doesn’t make any other predictions. That is to say, there ain’t no experiment that could be done nor is there any observation that could be made that would say, you guys are wrong. The theory is safe, permanently safe. I ask you, is that a theory of physics or a philosophy?”
As it stands, from a mathematical standpoint, string theory is not a theory, it is conjecture. The difference is not simple word play. A conjecture is an idea, proposed as true which has not been proven or disproven. After it has been proven true it becomes a theorem. There is no way to probe and magnify the infinitely small dimensions in which the strings live. And without that, no way to prove or disprove the conjecture. It’s a house of cards, built on sand. But what an elegant house. But the cards-on-sand approach has been taken before – many Doctoral thesis and postdoctoral research papers were written based on the Reimann Hypothesis before it was proven - and if it were ever disproven all of those would have headed for the circular file.
Dr Michio Kaku, cofounder of the string-fields theory says “Thus far, M-Theory has withstood every mathematical challenge. In the past, previous attempts at a theory of everything could be shown to be mathematically inconsistent. M-Theory is the only theory which seems to be mathematically consistent. However, there are many solutions to M-Theory, one of which may be our Universe. No-one has found that one solution yet.” (His books, “Beyond Einstein” and “Hyperspace” are exceptionally well written)
So, whilst it may contain the unified answer to life, the universe and everything, we’re not quite sure of what numbers to plug in to get it. 42 could be a good start. Regardless, I like it. I feel the main fault of superstrings is that they are too far ahead of current mathematics.
When Einstein constructed the theory of Relativity, all of the mathematical tools he required had been developed and proven fifty years earlier. Superstring theory requires more mathematical tools than we currently possess which need to be developed. It is an incredibly promising field of study, which has already produced some profound and intriguing results.
As Huxley said, "The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Even if the bottom falls out of it and it is proven bunkum, it's still an elegant work, which, with many worthwhile offshoots in theoretical physics and mathematics.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:57 PM
August 18, 2005
Planets 9, 10, 15 and 8 again.
Navarre of the Mooted Point writes:
Dr. Meathe,
This whole situation concerning the tenth planet is becoming convoluted along with talk of declassifying Pluto as a planet. Can you tell us, what WOULD be an acceptable name for a tenth planet (strike Xena right now) AND what exactly makes a celestial body a planet since people are getting all huffy over poor icy Pluto now.
Bastard. I didn't think people were going to ask hard questions. And so we enter the realms of angels and heads of pins.
The basic definition of planet is "A nonluminous celestial body larger than an asteroid or comet, illuminated by light from a star, such as the sun, around which it revolves." Beig roughly spherical, compressed under it's own mass rather than the uneven shape of a 'lump'o'rock' asteroid helps quite a bit too.
So it's a thing that isn't self illuminated (not a star) that revolves around a star but is bigger than an asteroid or comet. Which is one of those loosly worded definitions that just causes problems down the track, with a lot of wiggle room to argue.
Some astronomers think Pluto is just one of many similar objects in the Kupier belt and not really a planet. Other astronomers want as many as 15 objects classified as planets (and more again in the future as they're discovered and they wish to approach immortality by stitching their name to a planet).
Currently, the cut-and-dry approach is to adopt the standards of the International Astronomical Union, which lists the ones you learnt at school from Mercury to Pluto. It classifies objects orbiting the sun as minor planets, major planets, asteroids, comets and trans-Neptunian objects.
Orcus, Ixion, 2002 UX25, Varuna, 2002 TX300, 1996 TO66, 2003 EL61,Quaoar, 2005 FY9, 2002 AW197, 2002 TC302, 2003 UB
Sedna is a bit odd, and further out. It's (usually) considered part of the Oort cloud, which is roughly one light year away - or one quarter the way to the nearest star to the sun.
The IAU is moving toward this definition: "A planet is a body that directly orbits a star, is large enough to be round because of self gravity, and is not so large that it triggers nuclear fusion in its interior." which neatly keeps Jupiter as a planet (it emits more heat than it gets from the sun, but isn't quite large enough to compress under it's own gravity enough to turn into a star - it needs to be about 70x bigger for that).
So, the final answer:
An acceptable name would probably be greek, latin or old-english in origin (eorthe->erthe->Earth, the latin was Terra or Tellus, Gaia in Greek), simply to be in keeping with the rest of them (at least for english speaking astronomers) - though they'll run out of infernals shortly.
It's a planet because the men in white coats who study such things tell us it is so. And we accept without question because they're the ones in white coats, and just perhaps they have access to those straight jackets and we don't like those. Currently Pluto is one. If they adopt the definition above, Pluto will keep it's status. There are others on the table which would definitely deregister Pluto.
Next question will not be "how long is a peice of string?"
Follow up Q/A
I always thought Persephone(G)/Persipina(R) would have been better for Pluto's moon, Charon (though, again, it would be odd to have the spring goddess locked in a frozen embrace). Charon would be better suited for something inside the Kupier belt, floating in the river of forgotten near-planets, like UB2003-313, the one the original question was about. But that's all named now, with no thought of consulting me on it, so we just have to make the best of it.
Thanatos (Death), Pontus (Deep sea) and Nix (Night) would be the front running names for me, in roughly that order.
As for the Norse, they already have the Sun (which is larger than all the other stuff in the solar system combined), and as an additional bonus, days of the week.
Sunna day - English "Sun" is from the norse "Sunna"
Mani's day - The Norse name for the Moon is Mani
Tyr's day - Anglified into Tues.
Oden's day - but Oden was also know as Woden, so it was Wodensday.
Thors's day
Freya's day
Saturn's day is the only greek-inspired day of the week.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:38 PM
Completely and utterly bloody pointless.
In an attempt to fill up space, there has been a new section added, "Ask Dr. Meathe". Any question. Any topic. Answers are guarenteed to have various degrees of humour and accuracy, consistantly within twelve standard deviations of 100% accuracy.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:45 PM
August 17, 2005
Art? Of course. Look at the red wall daubings.
It has to be said that I don't like modern art. At all. Generally, if it's cubism or beyond, it is almost guaranteed to be an exibit I'll stroll past without pause. I am a self confessed heathen when it comes to such things. Colours and blurred or shapless forms fail to move me. But this is... Just, hell, no.
This latest project, a functional suitcase bomb, will be included in a large art exhibition that will open under the auspices of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council a few days before Sept. 11 He said the strength of the bomb would be equivalent to “about four pounds of TNT. It doesn’t sound like much," he allowed, “but it’s enough to kill everyone in the gallery."
Bad taste? Not at all, dear chap, it's all meant to be a bold, transgressive work in this age of terrorism. A work to confound your emotions, expand your mind. It's art, you are not sophisticated enough to comprehend the lofty implications and moral exhorations this work exudes.
Mr. Hackett’s bomb is designed to be triggered from “anywhere else in the world—you call a cell phone.” He said that he had already purchased the cell-phone trigger. Only he knows the number—but, of course, he has no plans to explode it. "It won’t go off,” said Seth Cameron, creative director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Did Mr. Cameron feel safe with the bomb’s construction? “Given Chris’ illustrious past, at first, no. Basically, I’m just making him swear up and down that he’s not going to …. ” He trailed off. “It’s one thing for him to blow himself up, but when it comes to other people … I’m just crossing my fingers.”
Illustrious past? The one with an arrest for illegal posession of two AK-47s, a 9mmk pistol, pump action shotgun and a sten gun, on which he is on bail for. And he promised not to make it go boom. Cross your fingers and pray he takes those uppers for the duration.
I'm looking forward to the bomb squad taking out the exhibit with a few charges.
Or perhaps an advance entry to the Darwin Awards?
And the cynic in me screams "Publicity stunt."
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:58 PM
Just plain odd
A herd of cows in Sverdlovsk, Russia, will have to be fed confiscated marijuana as part of their winter diet after drug enforcement workers destroyed sunflowers and maize that 40 tonnes of dope had been planted among.
Meanhwile, the Fucking signs are being stolen from a small town that can't afford to replace them.
The mayor of the Austrian town of Fucking has asked tourists to stop stealing the road signs. Mayor Siegfried Hauppl said the town recently voted against changing its name. "Fucking is Fucking," he said.
(Update - this one is aparently very, very old, and listed on Snopes)
As Fitzhenry said, "Timing, degree and conviction are the three wise men in this life". When you're an unwise man, the three fates will descend on you with no mercy.
Englishman Melvyn Reed, 59, awoke from triple bypass surgery to a nasty surprise: his three wives were at the foot of his bed. There was nothing wrong with his vision - but his bid to stagger their visits had failed.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:03 PM
August 16, 2005
Working around the system
At the request of one of the other Time of Darkness staff, I've been looking at ways to work around restrictive firewall rules. You know the ones - "I just plugged into the college network. I can surf the net, but they won't let me mud".
The telnet protocol is often used to hack into things, and colleges are rampant with that kind of thing, so it makes sense for them to block the protocol, stopping people logging in to servers directly, and inderectly, cutting off mud access, even though it's off-campus.
May you all forgive me, Dulthail is now back online.
There is a solution and it's called Tunnelling. Rather like digging under the fences, it wraps up the telnet data inside HTTP traffic, and masquerades it's way out to the internet, where it goes to an interim machine that unwraps it and sends it to where it was meant to go in the first place.
There are free ways to do this and commercial ways. The free way requires that you have a second computer outside, permenantly connected to translate back from HTPP to telnet, which, in this case, wasn't available.
The commercial solution is far simpler, and costs around $4 a month. Download a client, click the auto configure button and set up a proxy in your mud client and you're back online.
And that is it. Around 5 minutes later, he was on the mud and I was wondering what the hell I just did and whether I would be struck by lightning for doing it.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:28 PM
August 10, 2005
Thank you. I'll take two.
If you like old films (and I do mean old), I have some good news. Many are now public domain. And they are freely available on the Internet Archive. Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Gollem (I did say old) and the original Night of the Living Dead. Of course it's not all horror, but that's where I'm starting.
There are 545 there at the moment. Get 'em while they last.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 05:07 PM
Double entendre? Yes. Intentional? Doubtless.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:37 PM
August 09, 2005
Conspiracies!
The truth is out there. Unfortunately, so are They. And They know you know this.
They employ all electrical power generating stations to distribute these signals, and appliances that draw power from them will be utilized as a carrier for this Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radition. You need a somthing to deflect these ELF electromagnetic psychotronic waves. Now.
But you don't know how to make a wave deflector correctly. You can't afford to do it wrong. The commercially available ones are perforated by Them. Make one of these while you can.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 02:07 PM
Change of theme?
I was half tempted to rework the theme here, after reading Webkittyn's post on changing the theme seasonally. However, I know there are several large disincentives:
- I no longer have the source to the seal animation at the top, so to modify it, I'd need to recreate it
- JPGs don't have transparencies, so all the background images are colour matched and blended with the current blue background colour. I should have made PNGs.
- Far to lazy to address points 1 and 2
- I'm still tinkering with the current one
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:28 AM
August 08, 2005
All hail King Torg!
I lasted through a part of Blogathon 05 (I wasn't participating in any capacity, I was simply online as part of a wider Kittyn pit crew), until about 3:30am. The following morning, the cat and dog having methodically and relentlessly chased invisble invaders around the house from about 4am on, I wasn't in any mood to pick up the keyboard and get coding (my pay isn't going to be docked, is it?). Or do anything that involved a monitor.
So, on a semi-regular tour of some second hand bookshops, I came across something which caught my eye. A cheap pen-and-pencil roleplay/game system, with no pretense to anything other than silly fun. So I picked it up. It reminded me that I haven't roleplayed offline for a very long while now - coming up on three years, which is, coincidentally enough, when I moved. It might be time to get back into it. I haven't looked into the d20 system at all, but I could be persuaded.
My family was always good at making games and cheap entertainment. Weekly visits to my grandparents led all the kids to wargaming (the earliest I can remember doing this was around age six), recreating World war II scenarios via the simple device of home made rules, a coin, a few dice pillaged from the Monopoly and Cluedo (Clue in the US) sets, my uncle's old toy soldiers, pillows and a heavy green blanket over the billiard table. Cannon and tank fire was simulated by flipping a coin (as though you were tossing it) from the barrel to vaugly where you wanted the shot to land. It was simple. It was fun.
My cousin, four years my senior, was making pen and paper sci-fi RPGs before I hit 8 (yes, I lifted part of this paragraph from an earlier post. It fits here). We travelled in super-hyper speeders to the Medusa galaxy, comandeered Transit Shuttles and journeyed to the limits of the galaxy, through wormholes and into alternate worlds. Then my uncle gave me a copy of Dungeons and Dragons for my tenth birthday - and worlds changed for me. Any time I had spare, I read, reread, memorised the books. I played the Fighting Fantasy games when there was no one else to game with. They're a choose-your-own adventure style book, with combat and dice rolling. They al seem to be getting a reprint - I shall buy these for my nephew (and a set for myself). Of course, other systems were played (Rolemaster, Hunter Planet, Traveller, Tunnels and Trolls, etc) but the staple remained TSR's offerings.
Judges Guild adventures were cherished, as they fit the three essential categories that were important to those of limited pocked money: they were extensive, readily customisable and, most importantly, relatively inexpensive. Dragon and White Dwarf magazines were the staple periodicals, when they could be found and afforded. Both magazines started their life as all encompasing, with articles and adventures spannning many systems, so they were not, as they both are now, exclusivly in-house. White Dwarf also had "Heavy Metal" - a section on painting miniatures.
The idea of using miniatures to represent people and monsters in D&D was old hat to us, as we'd always used Britain's knights (they were much cheaper then), plastic dinosaurs and any other toy that could be pressed into service. But the idea of one inch tall lead representatives of your character, that you got to paint, was striking. Citadel was the best, in my eyes, their figures were always cleaner. Ral Partha and Grenadier were also very good. There were a host of other manufacturers, and more latecomers and spinoffs (Mithril is one of the best I've seen lately). They were all 25mm (one inch to 6 feet) scale.
But Games Workshop (Citadel) moved into wargames in the early 90s. They progressivly made the figures more ornate, to appear striking, losing the elegant simplicity while simultaneously pumping up the size. One dwarf I measured stood at 30mm, overshadowing six-feet tall barbarians of a true 25mm scale. At the same time, White Dwarf became the in-house vehicle it is today, which was when about when I lost interest in the company.
I really do need to find a good RPG games store locally. Whilst online purchasing is well and good, browsing through an overcrowded shelf of games has something to be said for it.
And then a gaming group. Surely there's one in Manhattan somewhere who'll put up with not understanding me when I say "ite" (eight).
There is a Games Workshop store literally around the corner from me in the city, but I want something a eclectic, with offerings from many companies and, as was always my favourite, a large second-hand section, where occasionally you'll see something you wanted way back when and could not find or afford, or something you never knew about that piques an interest.
The game I chanced upon is Kobolds ate my baby! It's most definitely a beer, pretzels, music and more beer kind of game. ALL HAIL KING TORG! Burn cows! Bark Like a Kobold! Cast Magic Spells! Kill Chickens! Eat Your Friends! They're sick little monkeys over at 9th Level.
It's a game in which you play the kobolds. They're short, furry and have the life expectancy of a depressed lemming. They are all little gourmands (who knew?) and the finest food in the world is the chubby human child. The ways to get yourself killed many and varied, from the Angry Red God whose wrath is terrible and frequent, farmers wives, chickens, other kobolds and, of course, Random Horrible Deaths. It was fun to read, I'm rather looking forward to actually quaffing the beer while playing.
They also, it appears, make a companion game where the objective is to deliver burgers in 30 minutes or less.
Feeling a little hungry? Want a Ninja Burger? with a side of fries and a cola? Ordering from Ninja Burger? is simple! We already know where you are, so there's no need to enter an address. We can deliver anywhere, so unlocking doors or deactivating security systems is not necessary. To ensure your safety during the delivery process, please do not make any sudden movements. And please, do not tip the Ninja!
Now, if I can just round up a few people for beer, pizza and kobolds. Or Dungeons and Dragons. Anything.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:26 AM
August 05, 2005
You want to do what?
Following on from an earlier post, Australians are going ahead with test tube baby sharks.
Yahoo had an interesting article which tells us that
The gray nurse is one of the fiercest-looking but most docile marine creatures
And in the very next paragraph that
In a process called intrauterine cannibalism, gray nurse embryo pups develop a jaw and razor-sharp teeth very early in their development and cannibalize siblings in the womb.
which would not appear particularily docile to me.
Melbourne Aquarium this month artificially inseminated Lonnie, an 8-1/2-foot-long seven-gill shark with the sperm from a male tank mate.
Docile though they may be, artificially inseminating something that looks like this little girl is not something that seems inherently wise.
Some short while after that, they're going to remove the embryos (before they grow teeth) and pop them in individual, artificial wombs (they'll probably end up using buckets) of artificial shark-amniotic fluid, so they don't have the chance to eat each other.
Neither of which have been developed yet. Back to the drawing boards. And next time, frickin' laser beams!
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 02:13 PM
Rejoyce, for the technology gods are benevolent this day.
Please back your data up. This has not been fun.
Earlier in the week, they were wrathful, smiting my hard drive, consigning it to the demons of head crashes.
Knowing of Orpheus and equipped with a USB drive cradle, I made several attempts to see if anything at all could be read from it.
Every now and then it would actually spin up without (too much) crunching, which was slightly promising. The partitions are NTFS, and attaching it to a Windows PC proved useless. As soon as it mounted, Windows would try and write something to it - not helpful with a sick drive - crashing it again almost instantly.
Mounting it on the Mac laptop (yes, I do have a Mac and I do like it. It's IDE (Xcode) is very neat and excellent for MUD coding), proved more of a success, as it mounts NTFS partitions as read only. It would last anywhere between five seconds to two minutes before starting to grind again. Two documents were recovered.
But, by disconnecting it for 24 hours as soon as it started grinding, the following day, it would work a little longer.
I can only surmise the moisture inside that was causing the stiction and head crashes was slowly dissapating. Today, I was able to retrieve almost five hundred megabytes of data. Looking at this, which must have been the equivilant of gazing on the face of Eurydice, the demons returned, squealing for the data that was escaping the abyss. Or it may have been the heads scraping the platters for the last time. Whichever the case may be, any further hopes are abandoned.
Still missing is some experimental bitflag code, a few other test libraries that I wrote, and a substantial collection of PDFs and references, but I am well satisfied. All the important documents that were there are retrieved, all the email and most of the photographs (yes, and that one) are recovered.
It's time to look at home backup solutions. Burning a set of 15-20 backup CDs is not a workable solution, as something that is so inherently time consuming will not be done often enough. Knowing myself, it would be backed up every four weeks for the first three months, and three years hence when it crashes, I'll have 34 month old backups. A DVD burner is an option, but again, backups would run to several discs.
The currently favoured solution is Norton Ghost 9 (not the buggy 2003) and an external HDD. However, any suggestions are welcome, as it'll be a while before I can actually buy it.
For now, I'm going to go burn what I have recovered to CD.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:14 AM
August 04, 2005
A nice package?
Which File Extension are You?
(Found over on My life as a Blog Addict, who is aparently upholding the ancient and noble art of the shirt ninja)
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 05:05 PM
Between Google and eBay, you can get anything.
I was wondering about the Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997, with much ado about it's three nuclear RTG power sources (radio isotope generators, containing between them 72 pounds of 238-Pu).
It's currently fairly close to Saturn's moon Titan, with the next flyby on the 22nd, as best as I can work it out, at around 4:52am.
What has this got to do with eBay and Google? Not much, until, curious about how long 72 pounds of fuel would last, I googled plutonium.
It was an advertisement too strange not to click. The closest thing they had was a detector that would show how many grams of fissile material you had on your hands and some Revlon lip gloss of the same name. Strange marketing idea, really. How many people want to smear something called plutonium on their lips? Or maybe that works for some people.
[The continued entry is just plain geeky and about atomic decay rates and approximate operational time of Cassini]
With a half life of about 85 years, the power produced from a lump of 238-Pu decays at 1-(.5)^(1/85), or about .81% per year. But it's not when it all decays, it's what power threshhold Cassini will stop working on. Eight years after lauch, the RTGs that originally provided 850 watts would now be kicking out closer to 796.5 watts [arrived at via 850-(.9919^8)]
Cassini specs mandate 600-700 watts as minimuim, this threshold should be crossed around the 43rd year of operation, so there should be another 35 years left in it.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 10:39 AM
Hell is...
It has been remarked that hell is other people. This is broadly true, however should be refined to:
Hell is other people in a train with dysfunctional airconditioning during a hot and humid summer, at peak hour.
Whilst it doesn't have the same lyrical qualities, the heat, stench, plaintive hues and cries produces a certain infernal atmoshpere. But then these are all minor complaints.
Hell is taking the train to work this thursday morning in London.
Please, let it be uneventful.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:34 AM
August 03, 2005
Classification: Quadratus quadrum.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 10:58 AM
August 02, 2005
Discovering repairs
There's something wrong with the shuttle, this time insulation protruding frome the belly of the shuttle.
NASA says the protruding material could cause dangerous overheating during re-entry and lead to another Columbia-type disaster.
So, what bettter way to fix this than to strap an astronaut onto the end of the 58-foot robot arm and have him grab it? ...Once there, he'll tug out the ceramic-fabric filler with his gloved hands.... Plan B is to use forceps to pull it out. Plan C, is simply to saw it off as part of an unrehearsed manouver with a cobbled together saw made of velcro, a knife, plastic ties and the ubiquitous duct tape.
He will also have to make sure his helmet doesn't bump into the shuttle's fragile bottom.
I never really think of NASA as a 'fix the broken phone line with barbed wire and string' organization, however, improvisation is something they have shown themselves to excel at in the past. If you watched the movie Apollo 13 and were astonished at how they pulled it off, well, the crew actually had it much, much worse than that up there. Less power, less fuel, less oxygen.
Here's hoping the duct tape and bailing twine fix works this time too.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:05 PM
The computer gods are angry. At me.
Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.Henri Karrenbeld
One of the more unpleasant ways for your computer to remind you that nothing is forever is by generating crunching and grinding noises from the hard drive. This, to me, has always been an explicit proof that demons do inhabit computers, and they are glutting the maw of the abyss with my data.
We all know things wear out, though the computer is only three years old, I had expected a little more longevity from a modern drive.
I thought I'd take the drive out, buy a new one and reinstall everything and mourn the data that Apollyon is now enjoying.
On removal, I discovered something I had not seen on a hard drive before, a breathing hole, labelled "Do not cover". If, like me, you were under the impression these things were hermetically sealed in order to keep everything bad away from the microscopic-tolerence workings of the drive, you were wrong too. Upon further research, I find:
Hard disk drives are not airtight. They have a permeable filter (a breather filter) between the top cover and inside of the drive, to allow the pressure inside and outside the drive to equalize while keeping out dust and dirt. The filter also allows moisture in the air to enter the drive. Very high humidity year-round will cause accelerated wear of the drive's heads (by increasing stiction, or the tendency for the heads to stick to the disk surface, which causes physical damage to the disk and spindle motor).
So... You're filtering out particles of everything except water. Thank you. New York, over the last two months, has been consistantly incredibly humid. So, at the very least, I have a steaming gun.
Finding a replacement drive is proving slightly problematic. The drive bay doesn't get a lot of airflow, so the drive gets quite warm. The old drive was 4200rpm and most of the replacement ones I've seen run considerably faster, and consequently, hotter.
Hunt for replacement hard drive, or bite the bullet and just get a new laptop?
The jury is out.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 10:53 AM