(Things I found interesting recently.)
(ish!): The management of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo has mooted “manual stimulation” of Kibabu the gorilla, in order to grab some monkey semen for artificial insemination.
“I believe it’s done in Europe”, they say (maybe they’re harking back to the days of Weimar Berlin). Zookeepers, being the ones who’d get their hands dirty (so to speak), are — understandably — not too keen.
It now looks like something called “electro-ejaculation” will be used instead… sounds painful. (Link from forteana.)
My googlism: apparently I’m a tool to autoretrieve news from popular, or am I scheduled to be tried on those charges in december? yikes.
Wikipedia: Edit wars in progress. Fascinating stuff! (thanks to Crummy.com for the link).
the EU’s scientific advisors have stated that cod stocks in Europe are at their lowest ever levels, and will collapse without action. grim! More at New Scientist.
Things are getting crazy in the fight against spam: it seems AOL blocked access (for two weeks) to its mailserver from Telia.com, one of Sweden’s biggest ISPs (if not the biggest), due to spam.
Attached is an unauthorized translation of an article in the Swedish IDG paper Computer Sweden (web edition, Oct 24), provided by Claes Tullbrink.
Until a (previous) article was published, noting this ban, AOL had not succeeded in contacting Telia to talk about it. Amazing stuff.
blog is a Good Word — official. From Bayesian analysis of my mail spool, blog shows up 1525 times in non-spam mail, and never in spam.
Over on Boing Boing, Danny O’Brien notes
People who know me well enough, or google well enough, to uncover out my weirder behaviours will know that I can’t drive. It’s not some high-falutin’ statement about the environment. I’m just not very good at remembering which pedal does what.
Well, it’s good to hear there’s one more out there; me neither. It’s become a bit of a worry recently, since I may be moving to LA, which is notoriously one of the most ped-unfriendly places in the world (Antarctica excepted).
But why, you ask? I don’t know — but I think it’s a combo of these factors:
owning a car in Ireland is phenomenally expensive: due to bizarre traits of the insurance biz over here, it costs about $100-$140 a week to drive a car. That’s quite a luxury. For that price, you might as well just take cabs everywhere and let someone else do the hard work.
I live more-or-less in Dublin city centre, so walking and cycling does the trick nicely.
Dublin’s got good public transport for when the weather’s bad (see also cabs above).
er, laziness.
I guess it may be something I’ll have to sort out, at some stage, maybe. Eventually. (Damn that laziness!)
Bernie Goldbach is currently blogging live from the floor of OPEN_HOUSE_001, Media Lab Europe’s inaugural conference.
I’m impressed — by the technology, that is ;) . He’s blogging via email from a Nokia 9210i Communicator, to a Radio weblog, then via XML-RPC to the Kirbycom New Media Cuts Movable Type blog. cool!
Anyway, that’s enough of that — gotta get back to work!
Danny at Oblomovka bought a Roomba, and finds it extra useful for scaring cats.
Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it’s actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes – she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.
In a similar vein: I can vouch that, if Lego Mindstorms is good for anything, it’s scaring cats with its Otherworldly Silicon Intelligence. I think most cats eventually figure out that if there’s a string or stick linking a menacing object and a human, odds are that the human is controlling the object somehow. As a result, a robot really freaks them out.
But with Lego Mindstorms, they do get their revenge eventually, by eating the smaller bricks next time you build a ‘bot.
wow, seven to nine of the thirteen DNS root servers were flood-attacked on Monday, and nobody noticed. That’s cool.
… experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.
Giraffes smell so bad for the same reason tourists do: to repel parasites.
(Explanation: in Laos, we heard a funny story about a tourist on the bus who noticed that no locals wanted to sit beside him. He got talking to a local kid and asked why this was, and the kid let him in on the secret: the locals reckon tourists stink of insect repellent. And they’re right) (Link)
I quite like David Chess’ log — it boasts this quite good 419 piss-take:
FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR
OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN).
I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER,
THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION.
I WAS FALSLEY IMPRISONED UPON THE
IMPERIAL BATTLESTATION (“DEATH STAR”)
WHEN MY PLANET WAS HIDEOUSLY DESTROYED
AND ENDED BY THE BVERY BAD SITH LORD
VADER.
Thanks to Cam for the linky goodness.
History of www.maths.tcd.ie. Thanks to Dave Malone for sending me the URL, while chatting about the timeline — and about how Peter Flynn beat all of us to the coveted “first in Ireland” spot.
But then, being an SGML guru, and marking up a huge quantity of ancient gaelic texts, I don’t think anyone could possibly hold it against him ;) Check this out from the Annals Of The Four Masters:
Every plain in Ireland abounded with flowers and shamrocks in the time of Fiacha. These flowers, moreover, were found full of wine, so that the wine was squeezed into bright vessels. Wherefore, the cognomen, Fiacha Fin Scothach, continued to be applied to him.
things are getting scary. Two stories of note:
Guardian: US plans military rule and occupation of Iraq.
The US has plans to establish an American-led military administration in Iraq, similar to the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, which could last for several years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday.
The occupation of the country would need an estimated 75,000 troops, at an annual cost of up to $16bn, and would almost certainly include British and other allied soldiers. It would be run by a senior American officer, perhaps General Tommy Franks, who would lead the assault on Iraq, and whose role would be modelled on that of General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan. ….
The Iraqi project, outlined by Mr Bush’s senior adviser on the Middle East, Zalmay Khalilzad, would involve running the entire country until a democratic Iraqi government was deemed ready.
The vision laid out in the Bush document is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination. It’s a vision of a world in which it is American policy to prevent the emergence of any rival power, whatever it stands for — a world policed and controlled by American military might.
This goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It’s the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world, and it’s where the Bush vision goes seriously, even chillingly, wrong. A police force had better be embedded in and guided by a structure of law and consent. There’s a name for the kind of regime in which the cops rule, answering only to themselves. It’s called a police state.
Worth quoting this snippet too:
For example, as a way of enhancing “national security,” it promises to press “other countries” to adopt “lower marginal tax rates” and “pro-growth legal and regulatory policies” — your doctor’s names for tax cuts for the rich and environmental laxity. And it exalts economic relationships as more fundamental than political and social ones (a mental habit that orthodox conservative ideologues share with their orthodox Marxist counterparts), as in this passage praising free trade as a “moral principle”: “If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person — or a nation — to make a living.” (As distinct, presumably, from the secondary, not quite real freedoms of thought, conscience, and expression.)
Mimi Smartypants graces us with some fake Irish prejudice (to go with the Belgian one). “They are drunk all the time and they eat lots of potatoes, at least if you go by the jokes, which is the only way to form one’s fake prejudices.”
Actually, no, that’s about right. Only in Ireland can you find the bonus carbohydrate meal: a meal just isn’t a meal unless it contains potatoes, so anything that comes with rice (let’s say) will usually have a serving of spuds on top. Nowadays you might have to go off the beaten track a little to get this, but it’s still there, if you look. I’m a fake Irishman, clearly, since I don’t really like spuds all that much — but a few of my mates could talk for hours about some especially tasty potatoes they’ve eaten recently. It’s quite bizarre.
She also refers to an existing “fake Belgian prejudice”. Well, in my experience, anti-Belgian prejudice generally runs quickly into the difficult issue of Audrey Hepburn, and ends right there. She’s just non-bigotable.
Also from Mimi, linked by defective yeti: some fantastic meta-spam commentary.
[Here’s] a very weird subject line for spam: Watch Me Film Myself Masturbating. Whoa. That’s pretty removed from the subject/object consciousness. Can’t I just watch you masturbating? I have to watch “the making of” you masturbating?
If I could fit that onto one line, it’d go right into the SpamAssassin Bugzilla quips file, where we save the most stupid spam hooks — but I can’t, and it might come off wrong on its own.
Er, so to speak.
As BoingBoing has noted already, a Melbourne scientist has proposed that lemon juice could fight HIV effectively, with bonus spermicidal action too:
According to Mr Short, lemons could be used as a contraceptive by soaking a piece of cotton wool in the juice and inserting it into the vagina before sex. “We can show in the lab that lemon juice is very effective in immobilising human sperm and also very effective in killing HIV,” he said.
but:
Julian Meldrum, international editor of Aidsmap, told BBC News Online that the principle behind the theory seemed like good science. … However, he said: “There is not yet enough evidence that this will be safe and effective in practice. … We also need to examine whether it is safe to put what is quite a strong acid into contact with mucus membranes which are quite delicate.”
Ouch. Mr. Short said that some female researchers in his lab have noted that the application of lemon juice didn’t hurt. Yeah right — maybe it didn’t quite hurt per se, but I bet it stung like hell!
Top history tidbit:
The practice of using lemon juice to prevent pregnancy was commonly used in medieval times, including by the legendary lothario Casanova, but has been forgotten by modern medicine.
Rod pointed out that my RSS feed was borked. oops, WebMake and HTML::Parser had “tidied” it. Who knew that RDF was case-sensitive? Not I.
Ah well… now fixed.
Found on Paul Graham’s site: “according to a recent study, the MAPS RBL, probably the best known blacklist, catches only 24% of spam, with 34% false positives. It would take a conscious effort to write a content-based filter with performance that bad.”
The “recent study” is by David Nelson at Giga Information Group, sometime last year.
For the sake of it, I’ve checked out how the MAPS figures stack up using TCR, Ion Androutsopoulos‘ metric for measuring spam filter performance. TCR is a very nice single-figure metric, which takes into account the “inconvenience factor” of misfiled mails, based on a “lambda” setting indicating what action is taken when a mail is classified. For MAPS, I’m assuming a lambda of 9, the guideline figure for systems which bounce mail back to the sender, instead of 1 for simple tagging, or 999 for outright deletion with no notification.
So: using a lambda of 9, MAPS gets a TCR of 0.0912, a Spam Recall of 24%, and a Spam Precision of 17%. It’s worth noting that the baseline figure for TCR is 1.0, which represents no filtering whatsoever: ie. all the spam comes right into your mailbox.
In other words, using MAPS is more inconvenient all-round than not filtering your mail at all, if these figures are to be believed ;)
More spam: I’ve just assembled a totally-public corpus of spam and non-spam mail, to allow spamfilter developers to compare and contrast results using the same data. Let’s hope it proves useful.
Not spam: finally, I’m off to Chester for a wedding tomorrow morning; my good mates Kitty and Gerry are tying the knot, in Chester Zoo, no less. Let’s hope this horrible cold I’ve had all week dies down before Saturday…
holy shit, Advogato reckons I’m at Master level! Well, that’s nice, but I’m not entirely convinced yet. Not that I’m complaining ;)
“I spiked Ted Heath’s dinner”. “At a meeting in 1970, ad man Jeremy Scott sprinkled speed on the Tory leader’s canapes. His firm went on to win the party’s account, and Heath won the election.” … “I was really just trying to cheer everyone up,” he adds sheepishly. “The quantities I used were minute.”
The Guardian: Word of the week: “basically”:
“Perhaps you are one of those strong individuals who manages to resist the use of meaningless adverbs, but others will have recognised, guiltily, one of their own favourite words appearing as a verbal tic in a widely broadcast statement this week. On Friday, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, accused of attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, introduced a slice of South London syntax into the Boston court where he is being tried. Questioned by the judge about his intentions, he declared: “Basically, I got on to the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane.” …
New Scientist: Real-time 2D to 3D video conversion unveiled. “The company behind the new technology claims it is the first system to allow live television events to be watched through a PC in 3D”.
A gold urn made for a Nazi party leader has been discovered in a Bavarian lake, prompting a scramble by treasure hunters determined to get their hands on the Third Reich’s long-lost riches. However, getting at any gold that might be down there, may not be so easy:
Toplitz is a byword for everything dangerous in Alpine lakes. After 30ft there is no light, and below 100ft, the water is almost freezing. At 348ft, the bottom comes into view. There is no life at the bottom of the lake because there is not enough oxygen to sustain it.
348ft, fact fans, is 116 metres. Yikes, that’s some serious diving…
Bringing the net to Eden (Guardian). “In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps (…) But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They’re doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They’re doing it wirelessly, and they’re one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.”
ESAT-BT‘s website. See the ‘Go On-Line for 1 cent a minute’ ad? It’s not actually a link ;)
found on plasticbag.org, caption It’s worse than we thought:
SFGate: bored union reps make their own entertainment. “It was like a ‘Blazing Saddles’ routine, because every time these guys would move on their seats, you could hear flatulence,” said one union source. “And it went on the whole day! ”
I’ve moved to pinging blo.gs instead of weblogs.com; blo.gs seems to have some quite neat features.
some startup called ActiveBuddy has patented instant-messaging bots — in an application filed August 2000. Hilarity ensues…
ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay: “We invented interactive agents. (jm: bwahaha) Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That’s basically why we secured this patent” (in 2000).
Chris McClelland of WiredBots: “The Net::AIM module (which allows bot developers to connect to the AOL Instant Messenger TOC protocol through Perl) was around since 1998”.
Aryeh Goldsmith (author of Net::AIM): “the Net::AIM module is distributed with a bot”.
Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg: (the patent is) a “big win for the ActiveBuddy folks,” especially if it holds up to scrutiny.
My emphasis. ;) Sounds like ActiveBuddy have just spent a lot of money patenting something with a whole CPANload of prior art, and are on their way down the dot.plughole.
The Rockall Times reports that Mel Gibson is to shoot Finnegan’s Wake in Hittite:
Highly talented Hollywood all-rounder Mel Gibson is to direct a film version of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake made entirely in the ancient Anatolian language Hittite, we can reveal.
Respected linguist Gibson — whose flawless Scottish accent in 1995 epic Braveheart wowed audiences worldwide — has further stated that the film will carry no subtitles. Hopefully I’ll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling, he told a press conference. People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, Gibson added. But maybe I’m a genius.
Hollywood agrees. Take any project, stick Mel’s name on it and you’ve got a surefire blockbuster, the film’s producer told The Rockall Times. In any case, we’ve rewritten the script to include a suitable anti-English imperialist slant and a couple of big battle scenes. That’ll pack ’em in. …
Gibson hopes that the success of Finnegan — Cry for Freedom will enable him to bankroll some of his other pet projects, including a Inuit remake of Bridget Jones’ Diary and his eagerly-anticipated Macbeth, set in 1970s Belfast and spoken entirely in Etruscan with Sanskrit subtitles.
the FoRK list comes through with some truly classic high wierdness:
If one wants to purge the sources of malice of say a black magician, then purge his dinosaurs and his dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately most of our religions are based on dinosaur protection of eggs and thus mind control, regardless of the front they put out to the public.
VNUNet: You have mail: 31 billion a day, set to rise to 60 billion by 2006 (according to IDC). “Only a more effective means of filtering out spam would ‘ensure that email continues to be a valuable business and personal communications tool,’ he said.”
Torture A Spammer, a nifty Flash game from “white hat” email-marketing firm, emailSherpa.
Argh, so much mail to get through; I was away this weekend, then
offline for most of today waiting for a new line to be installed. But I
did get a new candidate for the bizarre spam award: Q: DOES YOUR FOREIGN
ACCENT SIMPLY GET IN THE WAY? Simple answer: nope. next!
some ILUG regulars conducted a war-drive around Dublin and found 378 stations, with quite a high range of WEP use compared to previous surveys: 39%. BTW, is this the first use of warcycling? The green alternative!
Mozilla fans (and people who want to see how anti-aliasing is doing getting into Mozilla HEAD) may find Chris Blizzard‘s blog worth tracking.
I’ve added a few more folks to the blogroll — Jeremy Zawodny (who now hosts one of the SpamAssassin primary sites), Rod, who contributes regularly to SpamAssassin, and Joel, who just writes cool articles about software development. ;) Where? yonder over rightwards…