" Kangaroo scrotum pouches are unusual sentimental little gifts that last and remembered for a long time because of its uniqueness." Well, I can't argue with that... (fwd: Bob Rickard's forteana post)

Irishman could face 10 years in jail for helping asylum-seekers to escape from Australian camp:

His solicitor told the court that he was pleading guilty to the offence. However she asked the court not to jail her client, who has no previous convictions, and who is due to leave Australia when his visa runs out in a few months time.

However the crown prosecutor said that the offence was such that it required a stiff penalty, both to punish the offender and as a deterrent to other would-be criminals considering similar action.

...

Insp Des Bray confirmed that Mr O'Shea had been arrested and charged at a campsite in Port Augusta on July 2nd. In a court appearance on July 3rd, Mr O'Shea was refused bail, and has been in jail since.

"Criminals"? In my opinion, Jonathan O'Shea's a hero. Personally, I don't miss the anti-refugee feeling in Australia.

A classic byline:

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (July 24, 2002 9:37 p.m. EDT) - Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It's even tougher when you're a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 15:54:43 +0100
From: "Martin Adamson" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Onetime dictator now broke, living with mom

http://www.nandotimes.com/world/story/477222p-3812684c.html

World: Onetime dictator now broke, living with mom

Copyright © 2002 AP Online

By TODD PITMAN, Associated Press

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (July 24, 2002 9:37 p.m. EDT) - Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It's even tougher when you're a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Valentine Strasser became the world's youngest head of state when he seized power in 1992 at the age of 25. But the limelight didn't last - four years later, he was ousted in another coup.

"I'm basically living off my mother now. She's been very supportive," the 35-year-old said at a neighborhood bar on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital.

"It's been tough. I'm unemployed, but I'm coping."

It was well before noon and the former president was doing what he often does on weekdays: Joking around with friends, playing checkers and sipping diligently on a plastic cup of palm wine - a cheap and highly potent alcoholic brew.

In contrast to the days when he commanded an army and courted the favor of foreign presidents, Strasser today seems to have reverted simply to being just another neighborhood kid.

Gone are the crisp military fatigues, new suits and wraparound sunglasses. In their place: A baseball hat worn backward, a Bob Marley T-shirt, dark green shorts and a pair of 'Air' Nike sneakers.

Asked how he spends his time now that he doesn't have to rule the nation, Strasser took a drag of his cigarette and thought for a moment.

"I've been drinking palm wine," he said. "You shouldn't say that. But this is a democracy now. So go ahead."

Things were very different a decade ago when Strasser, then a captain known for winning disco contests, headed up a group of twentysomething officers demanding unpaid salaries.

The protests snowballed into a popular coup that ousted dictator Maj. Gen. Joseph Momoh in April 1992.

Strasser was hailed as a savior by many. Even today, Freetown residents say he changed things for the better, drastically cutting inflation, cleaning up the capital and putting the long defunct national TV station back on air.

He and his junta - known as "the boys" because most were only in their 20s - scored points by waging war, if unsuccessfully, on the nation's hated rebels.

But Strasser was no angel. The young ruler was widely criticized when his government executed two dozen alleged coup plotters without trial on a Freetown beach.

Strasser promised to hand over power in democratic elections in 1996. But he was beaten to the punch by his No. 2 man, Brig. Julius Maada Bio, who overthrew him in a bloodless coup in January that year.

Strasser was forced into exile and soon ended up in Britain, where the United Nations arranged a special scholarship for him to study law at Warwick University in Coventry.

University spokesman Peter Dunn said the former dictator spent 18 months at the school before dropping out, saying in a letter that he'd run out of money.

Media reports at the time said Strasser slipped away to London and changed his name to Reginald to avoid the press and potential enemies. In 2000, his student visa expired and he was deported.

Soon after, he made his way back to Sierra Leone, which is only now emerging peacefully from a decade of civil war in which rebels abducted children into their ranks and killed, raped and maimed tens of thousands of civilians.

Unlike many of the world's former heads of state, however, Strasser was not treated to a generous government stipend or given a plush mansion or bodyguards.

A house he built for himself on the edge of town was burned down by aggrieved soldiers in 1999, so he moved into his mother's two-story house across the street.

The government says Strasser is not entitled to benefits because he took power by force. Strasser concedes the point but says he should be treated better.

Last year, the government called on citizens not to throw stones at the former head of state, who without a car, was wandering around Freetown on foot.

But Strasser is still immensely popular among some, and may be able to capitalize on it. In five years, he'll be eligible to run for president - something he says he's considering.

Charismatic, muscle-bound and six-foot-two, he's the dominant figure at the bar he often frequents, which stands tenuously together with bamboo poles and plastic sheeting somehow obtained from the U.N. World Food Program.

Whatever the future holds, Strasser will always have his high-profile past to relish.

"Oh it was good. I was the youngest ... head of state in the whole wide world," he said with a guffaw, looking around the bar for support.

Then he leaned forward with a wide smile and slapped a high-five on the hand of someone sitting across from him.

"An obsessive anti-abortionist who murdered a security guard has quoted Bible passages to a Supreme Court judge to try to prove he is not psychotic." Fwded from forteana...

Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 07:15:31 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
To: "Forteana List": ;
Subject: Chock full of sig potential

my favourites are the first and second-last paragraphs

----- (from The Herald Sun (Melbourne) 26.7.02)

Abortion clinic killer: I'm not psychotic By WAYNE HOWELL, Supreme Court reporter July 26, 2002

AN obsessive anti_abortionist who murdered a security guard has quoted Bible passages to a Supreme Court judge to try to prove he is not psychotic.

Peter James Knight, who killed Steven Rogers at a family planning clinic on July 16 last year, said he objected to taking oaths on religious grounds.

In April, a jury found Knight guilty of the killing. Knight was armed with a Winchester rifle and 14 rounds of ammunition.

For months after his arrest, Knight was known as Mr X because he refused to talk to police or reveal his name.

At a brief pre-sentence hearing yesterday, Knight agreed to the publicising of two psychiatrists' opinions and of a letter he wrote to Justice Bernard Teague.

In his letter, Knight rejected psychiatrist Dr Ron Senadipathy's opinion that he was psychotic. He said his opposition to taking oaths was not delusional but was based on biblical scripture.

"Firstly, James, chapter 5 verse 12 says: 'My friends, above all else, don't take an oath. You must not swear by heaven or earth or by anything else. Yes or no is all you need to say. If you ... anything more you will

be condemned," he told the judge in his letter.

Dr Senadipathy told the court Knight's delusion about taking oaths had led to his living in a humpy in a forest so he did not have to take oaths or sign declarations by earning income or claiming social security.

The psychiatrist said Knight was a highly dangerous man who suffered chronic paranoid schizophrenia. "He committed the crime driven by his delusional interpretation of the Bible and moral values he developed accordingly," Dr Senadipathy said in his report.

But another psychiatrist, Dr Justin Barry Walsh, said Knight was not mentally ill, just "odd".

Knight believed taking oaths was childish nonsense and violated the Bible's teachings.

Knight also said he had designed a perpetual motion machine and a better mousetrap, but was reluctant to give any detail for fear of being thought a nutcase.

The case was adjourned.

Herald Sun

EBay comes in handy as a "source of evidentiary ephemera for asbestos litigators":

After a heated bidding war on EBay, Mark Lanier recently paid $2,125 to win a 1941 naval machinery manual. It sounds like a peculiar collecting hobby, but to Lanier it was serious business. The Houston lawyer, who sues companies on behalf of asbestos exposure victims, was bidding against a defense lawyer to get his hands on an evidentiary trophy filled with details on where and how asbestos was used aboard ships.

LA Times, via Gary Stock on the Irregulars list...

Here we go again -- the Dead Russian Composer Personality Test. My result:

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Igor Stravinsky. Known as a true son of the new 20th Century, my music started out melodic and folky but slowly got more dissonant and bizzare as I aged. I am a traveler and a neat freak, and very much hated those rotten eggs thrown at me after the premiere of The Rite of Spring.

HiWAAY's spam-filtering statistics, online.

Har har... a tale of two emails. Take one April 3 2000 post to ILUG:

The concept of revocable email addresses has been around for ages - once you're set up to do subaddressing (such as user+foo@bar.com), it's dead easy to do all by yourself, with the added bonus that you're not dependant on some third party service provider.

Yep, sure I do it myself using virtusertable: jm-latestdodgydotcomstock@jmason.org gets deleted once it gets spammed.

Forget all about it for 2 years...

... and eventually follow up with a 20 July 2002 spam to me:

Long Beach Film Festival - Now Accepting Films & Screenplays

The Long Beach Film Festival is now accepting screenplays and films (short, documentary & feature) in all formats. The winners' work will be reviewed by a committee of established production companies. This is a great way to get exposure and even discovered in Hollywood.

What address was it sent to? Yes, that's right -- jm-latestdodgydotcomstock at jmason.org. Oh the irony.

Good article explaining why the 'distributing objects by class' model doesn't work - found at Morbus Iff's blog.

Collatoral Spammage 2002, a "How much spam do you get?" survey, results here. (found via aaronsw's blog).

Currently there's a neat curve around 21-50 per week, and then a big jump at the 201-400 range, where I find myself (spamtraps not included -- they get more like 30k spams a week ;)

I reckon this jump in the graph is a result of the poll URL being passed around people who are interested in the subject -- who, if my experience is anything to go by, generally find themselves interested because they're snowed under by the stuff.

Anyway, some further reading brings me to two TidBITS articles on the subject: Content
Filtering Exposed and Email Filtering: Killing the Killer App.

For what it's worth, I agree to an extent with Adam and Geoff on the subject: the mail delivery infrastructure should not be clogged up with content filtering, with two caveats. (read on for more)

... Some further reading brings me to two TidBITS articles on the subject: Content Filtering Exposed and Email Filtering: Killing the Killer App.

For what it's worth, I agree to an extent with Adam and Geoff on the subject: the mail delivery infrastructure should not be clogged up with
content filtering -- but with two caveats.

• Unless the user wants filtering to take place: content filtering should be left to the user's discretion. It makes me uncomfortable when I receive mails from some guy I've never corresponded with, asking "who the hell is SpamAssassin and what has he done to my mail?". It's clear in every case that what's happened is that an ISP has installed SpamAssassin with the default configuration, which is oriented towards an end-user on a UNIX desktop, not some poor bought-a-windows-box-a-month-ago newbie.

  There's a bucketload of documentation telling ISPs how to install for their situation, but clearly someone's not reading it, and SpamAssassin gets a bad reputation as a result.

• Unless the filters do something other than bounce or bit-bucket: False positives will always happen, so there has to be some way for the mail to be received correctly if it's an FP. In SpamAssassin, we simply tag the mail, so the user can filter to a separate mailbox and scan those for FPs occasionally, and we document that FP's do happen, and happen regularly.

  Bit-bucketing or bouncing the mail will either (a) mildly irritate some senders ("what do you mean my mail is porn?"), (b) greatly inconvenience other senders (the large-scale TidBITS case), or (c) result in an important mail going AWOL (the worst-case scenario). Not recommended.

With both (not either ;) of those caveats noted, it's a vastly improved situation.

It's worth noting as well that SpamAssassin also takes a "straw that broke the camel's back" approach to avoid the "if mail contains 'Viagra', then bounce it" stupidity. Unless multiple problems are found in the message, it's not filtered. That, along with the automatic whitelist, makes a big difference.

The Spam Has Got To Go -- (link via HtP) --

"I used to think that spam was akin to junk mail that we all get in our physical mailboxes. I once even argued that I got more junk postal mail than junk email. Those days are long gone. It has now become a daily deluge. It is analogous to people driving by your house and stuffing your mailbox with trash and pornographic materials and other insults to your intelligence and your morals. People are advised to get a new email address to avoid the problem. That is analogous to having to pick up your furniture and family and move to a new house. And then within days if not hours, be found and have your mailbox stuffed once again."

The author gets it right, until they hit the paragraph at the end stating (along with Jon Udell) that digital IDs and signed emails are the solution. That's the problem -- one can't wander around telling all your correspondents to rebuild their email systems, and use new methods simply to talk to one. And even then, a whole new -- and scary -- layer of infrastructure needs to be built to issue, guarantee, and revoke the IDs, and let's hope to ghod it's not Verisign ;) It's just not viable.

Damn, the Simputer development effort is running into money problems.

THE SIMPUTER -- whose name is an acronym for Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual Computer -- was launched in April 2001. ... Running on AAA batteries, they included a built-in speaker, microphone, telephone jack and modem as well as USB and smart card connectors. Internet browsers and e-mail applications would be standard. Among software that has been developed for the Simputer are applications covering electronic governance, literacy initiatives and dissemination of health information.

'Nobody has built a computer for the rural and poor people. Also, there is no license for the hardware or software. That is probably the reason for their hesitation.'

Sweetcode.org: haven't looked at it in 6 months, but it's got great stuff, like:

• CRM-114 "is a system to examine incoming e-mail, system log streams, data files or other data streams, and to sort, filter, or alter the incoming files or data streams according to whatever the user desires. Criteria for categorization of data can be by satisfaction of regexes, by sparse spectra, or by other means. Accuracy of the sparse spectra function has been seen in excess of 99 per cent, for 10+ megabytes of learning text".

• Panorama Tools : "Software to View, Create, Edit and Remap Panoramic Images". If I can ever afford to get all my photos printed, I'll need this.

According to BrightMail, spam volume to their traps has quintupled in the last year; from 879,253 messages per month to 4,825,144. Insane. PDF graph here.

Bake, Don't Fry: Aaron Swartz has written a good article about static page generation vs. database-backed websites, with a hefty plug for WebMake.

But he seems to miss the fact that WebMake does all the dep-tracking tricks described in Building Baked Sites -- modulo the odd bug in the dep-tracking code. ;).

"(On July 4) Israeli officials reported that a missile may have exploded a few miles from an EL-AL plane flying over the Ukraine. Over the weekend, however, both the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and Ukraine's National Space Agency indicated that a meteor rather than a terrorist attack may have been the cause of the atmospheric fireball explosion."

Random musing: I saw a memorable meteor strike while I was visiting Fraser Island in Australia -- while walking along in bright sunshine, without a cloud in the sky, a burning fireball streaked across the sky from west to east. It burnt up before it hit the sea, however. Wish I'd got a picture.

Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 09:35:37 +0100
From: Rachel Carthy (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Meteors target Israelis

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc070802.html

CCNet 79/2002 - 8 July 2002

Only two days before a Space Roundtable at the United States Senate will address "The Asteroid Threat", an atmospheric impact on July 4 (Independence Day) has set off a timely reminder that the impact hazard is not limited to large objects. Last Thursday, Israeli officials reported that a missile may have exploded a few miles from an EL-AL plane flying over the Ukraine. Over the weekend, however, both the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and Ukraine's National Space Agency indicated that a meteor rather than a terrorist attack may have been the cause of the atmospheric fireball explosion.... The latest incident should serve as a catalyst to begin addressing the political, economic and security risks due to smaller NEOs, a perpetual threat that has been neglected for far too long.

--Benny Peiser, 8 July 2002

Hooray! Dug my headphones out from the box where they've been stowed for the last 6 months, found my mp3 backups, and I can finally listen to music again! Current top picks (in a retro style):

• Tribe of Issachar - original dubplate

• Barrington Levy - Under Mi Sensi

• Congo Natty - Champion DJ

• Hyper-On Experience - Lords of the Null Lines

• Sizzla - Praise Ye Jah

Man, I missed good reggae on my holidays -- there's only so much Bob Marley you can take ;)

Biological Warfare and the "Buffy Paradigm".

Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation (biological warfare) -- and planning for it -- is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or chaos theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the Buffy Paradigm, and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the Buffy Syndrome.

My ghod. It's not quite as bad as Jerry Pournelle and SDI in the 80's, but it's getting there...

"Archaeologists can now say with confidence what life was like for the Roman legionaries stationed at the end of empire: in Carlisle, almost 2,000 years ago - it rained all the time and it stank of fermented fish."

Synchronicity! The fermented fish paste cropped up at the weekend, too. Described in the article as "a luxurious import from Spain and undoubtedly one of the most prized possessions of a wealthy Roman officer" and (in Latin on the amphora) "Tunny fish relish from Tangiers, old", this was made near my parents' house in Torrox in Andalucia, Spain -- or at least, if it was common across Spain, the Torrox version was much prized by the Romans.

Sadly, it's no longer made. But I'm a bit of a fish paste fan -- you can't make decent Thai or Laotian food without nam pla, and for a taste sensation on toast, Patum Peperium ("The Gentleman's Relish") is unbeatable in a steampunk-breakfast kind of way. In fact, the Roman paste sounds very similar. (Link)

Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 09:12:12 +0100
From: "Tim Chapman" (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Roman sauce

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,751857,00.html

Legionaries' lament of mushy fish

Dig reveals Roman Carlisle

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent

Tuesday July 9, 2002

The Guardian

Archaeologists can now say with confidence what life was like for the Roman legionaries stationed at the end of empire: in Carlisle, almost 2,000 years ago - it rained all the time and it stank of fermented fish.

The historians assured the mayor of Carlisle that their latest piece of research tasted much better than it looked, which still left considerable room for argument.

The fish sauce, recreated from an authentic Roman recipe, and served up at Carlisle Castle last night, looked appalling.

"It looked frankly like something Baldrick would have served Blackadder. Actually it looked just like mud - lumpy mud," one sceptical diner said. Martin Allfrey, English Heritage head of collections, said firmly: "It did look slightly off putting, but pesto, which everyone likes now, isn't exactly a picture of loveliness either. It tasted - well, perfectly all right. Quite interesting, really."

The broken container of fish sauce, which was a luxurious import from Spain and undoubtedly one of the most prized possessions of a wealthy Roman officer, was one of hundreds of thousands of objects found in a large dig at Carlisle Castle, which turned into one of the richest Roman excavations in Britain.

The condition of many of the finds, perfectly preserved in the sodden soil, was startling. There were almost 10,000 pieces of leather and timber - including dozens of pieces of complex wooden drainage pipes, suggesting that coping with the rain was a signifcant headache for the Romans.

Among thousands of pieces of broken pottery there was a nondescript chunk of the neck of a common amphora, which still had an attached label. In Latin it promised that its contents were "Tunny fish relish from Tangiers, old", "for the larder", "excellent" and "top quality".

Tangiers is believed to have described the style of the sauce, rather than the origin, which was probably Cadiz. The sauce was made of tuna fish chopped into chunks, salted, and then fermented in its own juice packed into a clay amphora - the one at Carlisle would have held at least a gallon of sauce.

For last night's guests this unlovely greeny brown sludge was then diluted with garlic, thyme, cumin, lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil and wine.

Phew! That took a while, and it was only the watch-camera pics. The 1000 "proper" photos may take a while longer to get up. But without further ado, here's some shots from my travels:

• Travelling in Australia (January and February)




• New Zealand (March)




• Thailand and Laos (April)




• Nepal (May)




• India (June)

BTW regarding the Nepal image above: we must have just missed these guys, but their MS-sponsored patches (surely "service packs"? snicker) were much in evidence along the trail.

The evolved keyboard.

Danny O'Brien:

Mac Websites have this quality of I've been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!. Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.

(both via BoingBoing.) BTW I've removed swhack -- which seems to have 404'ed -- and replaced it with Oblomovka and Aaron's blog.

One for Ireland Offline -- the Pew Research Center's report The Broadband Difference: How online Americans' behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home.

For broadband users, the always-on, high-speed connection expands the scope of their online activities and the frequency with which they do them. It transforms their online experience. This has led to steady growth in broadband adoption among Net users. Since the Pew Internet Project first inquired about the nature of users home connection in June 2000, the number of high-speed home users has quadrupled from 6 million to 24 million Americans. This places home broadband adoption rates on par with the adoption of other popular technologies, such as the personal computer and the compact disc player, and faster than color TV and the VCR.

The Open Web Application Security Project's Guide to Building Secure Web Applications:

The Guide covers various web application security topics from architecture to preventing attack specifics like cross site scripting, cookie poisoning and SQL injection.

Hotmail users face summer of random email deletion: "Microsoft Hotmail users have been warned that their emails could be randomly deleted this summer, unless they pay UKP 19.99 for extra storage space."

Good NYT article on spam. Worth blogging, despite it's age, for this stat:

A (Federal Trade Commission) survey showed that 63 percent of "remove me" options (on spam mail) either did not work or resulted in even more e-mail.

I've tested this, too, but it's nice to have such an authoritative source to quote.

However, they missed SpamAssassin -- totally off their radar, it seems. I wonder why?

Interesting notes on level design in 3D games. FPS means first-person shooter, TPS third-person shooter. Both refer to the position of the "camera" while you're playing.

In an FPS, realistic room sizes would be pretty much what they are in real life, in a TPS they're closer to double that of real life. If your average bedroom is 4x5 meters and 2.5 meters high, in a TPS the size would be 8x10 meters and the height 4 meters; the great thing about larger sizes is that the characters are easier to control and the spaces don't even feel too big!

But what about furniture? If the room is 150-200 percent of realistic size, surely the pieces of furniture need to be large as well? Not exactly. The best approach really is to make the furniture close to real life scale as the characters in the game are as well of real size -- making the furniture larger would result in the characters looking like children and that's definitely something you should avoid. Please note I'm not saying you shouldn't scale the furniture, but rather than the effect should be kept to a bare minimum; making the pieces 10-20 percent larger than what's realistic still results in close enough real size tables, chairs, couches etc., but it also ensures the rooms don't look overly large. Its also important to remember the spacing between the pieces -- even if they are about real life size, the space between doesn't need to be, go with whatever still looks good and makes the movement of the characters easier.

A good rule of thumb for all this is to make things the player gets near closer to the their real life size. Objects further away can be too large, as it often makes the space look of more realistically sized. Another pointer to keep in mind is a thing they teach people studying architecture: one centimeter on the floor is ten on the wall is a meter in the ceiling - as your gaze is usually downward, you tend notice small things on the ground more easily than larger ones in the ceiling.

Yeesh! taint.org is rapidly turning into BlogAssassin, it looks like. Here's a good SpamAssassin story from Declan McCullagh: Deconstructing Richard Gephardt's releases, by SpamAssassin. 3 WHOLE LINES OF YELLING DETECTED!

Whoops -- another SpamAssassin plug, this time from Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the RISKS Forum. Looks like I'm collecting the entire Internet Secret Cabal at this rate!

I'm back! And I wrote a long, well-thought-out update, and poxy, broken SuSE 8.0 ate it, without even leaving a dead.letter turd. Bastard.

But in the meantime, I must note that it's mind-bogglingly cool to have people like Salon, Bruce Sterling, Simson Garfinkel and Cory at BoingBoing plugging SpamAssassin, and to come back to Ireland to find that dogma, our humble server, got slashdotted as a result!

In passing -- it looks like Danny O'Brien now has a blog called Oblomovka. Worth taking a look at. I'm still struggling through several thousand mails, so for now even adding it to my bookmarks is on the to-do list.

OK, we're back in Pokhara, after a 10-day trek up to the Annapurna Base Camp. Much fun, and much dhal bhat, was had by both of us, despite some initial scariness...

Basically, myself, Catherine and Bhadra our guide, spent a very pleasant first night in Dhampus, the first stop on the 10-day trek. Much rakshi (local millet booze, tastes like watered-down lukewarm vodka) was imbibed, resulting in some seriously ludicrous attempts at Nepali dancing! Thankfully there's no photos.

Next day, we hiked up to the next town, Pothana, over some very leechy trails (top leech tip: cover your boots in salt, they can't stand it). All well and good, until halfway through the town a Dutch guy ran out of a teahouse and stopped us, telling us that an English couple had been attacked in the forest just outside the town -- of course, we immediately went to meet them. The guy had a bloodsoaked bandage tied around his head, and told us how himself and his girlfriend had been walking through the forest towards the next town, Landruk, when a Nepali guy approached. The English guy said namaste (hello), and was rewarded with a wallop over the head with a 6-foot stick! They then stole his girlfriend's rucksack and attempted to take his, but (somehow) he managed to fight them off with half of the stick, then escaped.

With some help (and interpreting) from Bhadra, we found out from the locals that there was a gang of robbers operating in this forest, and a week previous to this, 2 Swedish girls had to be airlifted out because they were too badly beaten to walk! Serious problem -- and one nobody had bothered to inform any of us tourists about!

After this, the 8 tourists, and their respective guides and porters, all trooped out of the village -- Bhadra knew a quick route back to the road over a ridge, which saved us a half-day's walk back via Dhampus. Along the way, the English couple were stopped by what seemed to be the entire village, who were having a very heated conversation. The upshot was that they wanted the English couple to wait around for a half day until some of the men returned from the forest, hopefully with captive robbers in tow, and then the whole lot would get the bus back to Pokhara (the nearest city) and give out stink to ACAP, the Annapurna Conservation Area Project, who run the area. The English couple agreed, and we went on.

Eventually, we sidetracked around to another way up the trek. Myself and Catherine were the only 2 tourists to head up -- everyone else decided to head back to Pokhara, but we were happy enough with Bhadra's assurances that this route was very well-travelled, with no forests and no known robberies (by day at least).

It turned out for the best in the end -- we had an amazing trek, got loads of pictures, saw the entire Annapurna range from the Annapurna Sanctuary, no clouds, and no further robberies. And lots of rakshi!

In the end, we heard through the grapevine that the robbers had been attacked by the local Maoists (the police don't patrol the mountains any more). One 17-year old robber was shot, and 2 more had their arms and legs broken. Rough justice in the traditional paramilitary law enforcement style, I guess. (By the way, the Maoists enjoy about 80% support in the mountains, from what we've heard).

The remaining robbers hightailed it to Pokhara as well (they were not locals), and were eventually arrested. Hopefully the Nepalese law enforcement system can sort it out - corruption is apparently rife, but around here they take these kind of tourist-targeting attacks very seriously -- for many people, it's their livelihood, and it's already suffered a lot this year due to the political situation.

So, a happy ending for us, and a warning for anyone else out there thinking of doing the Annapurna Sanctuary trek -- stick to the known-safe trails, and bring a Nepali guide/porter for extra safety.

Photos will be forthcoming once we get back to Ireland, earn some money, get them developed and scan them in. This could take several months though... ;)

Latest update: (This one's a bit lazy. I'm just editing Catherine's mail to travelogue, adding a few bits.)

We flew from New Zealand to Bangkok on the 18th of April. From Bangkok we headed for Laos via Nong Khai in North-eastern Thailand, on a comfy first-class train carriage again (spoiling ourselves!).

We then made for the Northern Thai border, passing through Vientiane, Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang.

Vang Vieng is a tiny little town which has evolved into a tourist chill-out zone for falang (foreign) and south-east Asian tourists alike -- we spent a nice afternoon with a group of holidaying Thai Buddhist monks, jumping into a deep river pool on a rope swing! (Camera was out of film for that one, sorry folks). Great fun spot though.

Having said that, Luang Prabang was definitely the highlight, I would highly recommend anybody to go there. The city is crammed with Buddhist temples from the 14th to the 21st century counterbalanced with crumbling old french colonial architecture. All of this is set by the Mekong river, filled with river traffic of all descriptions from water buffalo to large chinese sampans.

After this we headed for Thailand, up the Mekong river, on a speedboat. These are a reasonably insane way to travel, hitting speeds of 80km/h, and shooting the occasional rapids! We'd heard it was possible to have to wait a day or two before getting on a boat, so we paid extra to pre-book, just to make sure it was OK.

Things started badly, with an hour and a half delay as our pre-booked tickets didn't really seem to make a difference; eventually we persuaded our boat to get underway, with 7 passengers instead of the promised max 6.

Then we hit Pakbeng, the halfway point, had a spot of lunch, and waited another bonus 1/2 hour, before our driver informed us that we'd be changing boats after the 2 Lao passengers left, leaving 4 falang in the boat. (The passenger details may seem meaningless, but I think he'd never have embarked on the next bit if a local was around to give him a bollocking).

It turned out our new driver had a nice sideline in trading pla beuk (giant Mekong catfish) and live monitor lizards up and down the river! After about 6 stops for chats, buying and selling, our group of 4 was joined by his 2 mates, 2 sacks of live lizards, 2 2-meter-long live pla beuk and another large, live mystery fish, all thrashing about occasionally. I'd wanted to see a pla beuk, but not this much!

Eventually we lost the rag a bit, and I think this got us to Huay Xai before the border post shut for the day. Not a good experience. For reference, our tickets were booked through a ticket agent 2 doors up from the LPB Lao Aviation office (one of our co-passengers booked through the Lao Aviation office itself), and our agent had assured us that these things -- or the ones we could foresee at least! -- were not going to happen. Suggestion: don't bother pre-booking, or if you do, make sure you get these assurances in writing!

Anyway, after that we made it into Thailand, pretty sure we were going to be stuck in Chiang Khong (we'd missed the last bus to Chiang Rai or Chiang Mai, our intended destination). But the good news was that an agent of Namkhong Travel was touting on the far side of the Thai border post, and got 3 of us onto a very comfortable, very reasonably-priced private air-con minibus bound for Chiang Mai -- so see, touts are good! Namkhong Travel certainly get my thumbs-up anyway.

So we are currently in Chang Mai which we missed on our last visit, and ahead of schedule no less. We are not sure exactly what to do next, we have a few days to mess about with, as we are leaving SE Asia on the 11th of May to fly to Nepal.

Writing from an internet cafe in Luang Prabang, Laos. It's sweltering, of course, so we've spent a day hiding in the shadows of wats (temples) and drinking pineapple and lemon shakes.

Despite warnings of bbq'ed rat and grilled frogs, we've found the food to be excellent -- laap and sticky rice being the top favourite at the moment. Back to Thailand in a few days for more top tucker!

Well, we're back in Auckland after zooming around the South Island. Got to meet up with June and Vin in Christchurch for a tasty meal and much yakking about NZ; take a look at that site for pictures and imagine me and Kate instead of June and Vin, and you'll have a good idea of what we've been up to... I haven't even developed the photos we've taken yet!

We did meet up with a mate from Dublin -- Yvonne; we didn't even know she was over here, but there you go. Basically, we wandered into a Dept of Conservation (they manage the National Parks) office in Queenstown, intending to get some ideas of good walks to do, and who was working behind the counter but the girl herself. Small world! So we all did a 20km hike. WTF is New Zealand doing to us?!

Anyway, next update will probably be from Thailand -- we still haven't firmed up an itinerary yet. Let's hope the political situation in Nepal settles down before we get there...

We're currently zooming through New Zealand in the cheapest way possible,

while still managing to see some stuff - very hectic and lots of early 

mornings. Managed to see lotsa dolphins close-up and do a 15km trek to see a crater lake on Mt Ruapehu ("see" in quotes because it was pissing rain and so foggy we could barely see 100m anyway).

Good laugh being had anyway, although there's a danger we'll catch scurvy from all the cheap noodles and packet pasta we're eating...

Help! We're staying in a tent in a malarial swamp for 56 bucks a night! Can you spell rip-off?

But I think that's Byron Bay for you. We'll probably stay here tonight for the night that's in it -- there's lots of bars here (happy Paddy's Day), then rock up to Lennox Head, which sounds like a thoroughly nicer (and cheaper) beach chill-out kind of place. With any luck Lennox Head has less fairy-tat-selling hippie shops, flaming jugglers, etc. as well.

Fraser Island was cool, dingoes spotted, still no snakes or sharks though! BTW I'm not impressed by the "that'll kill ya, mate" stories -- IMO, picnics in th' oul' sod are more beset by stinging insects, plants, and rampaging animals than this place is (Queensland stingers and crocs excepted). Sure, there are dangerous animals out there, but they're extremely rare, whereas the minor irritations of aggressive wasps and nettles are far too common at home. Plus the weather's nicer here ;)

In other news I've just plumped for a copy of Lord of the Rings, so my reading will be sorted for the next few months I think!

La Feile Padraig shona diobh, will update again soonish...

Touching land once again! Much swaying is taking place as the sea legs wear off.

The Whitsundays are lovely -- a great archipelago of 74 islands off the Queensland coast, with beautiful blue seas and white coral and sand beaches. Good fish-watching too: pairs of cuttlefish, some large coral and potato cod, and -- best of all -- a huge (1.5m) Maori wrasse called "Elvis". Catherine got some diving in, but I was surface-bound by a nasty cold so had to stick with snorkeling. Still, I think I saw more fish, ha.

Now off to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island (via the night bus. argh). Another update at that point!

Well, just back from diving on the Great Barrier Reef; lots of good fish, and no attacks from groupers called "Grumpy", thankfully.

Disappointingly, there were no sharks either. But I spotted lots of other good wildlife; a good few green turtles munching coral, lionfish, and some pretty large coral cod.

Great diving! Hopefully the pictures will come out OK once they're developed -- if so, I'll scan 'em. First though, there's sailing in the Whitsundays...

Hi travelogue readers! Quick links for photos (probably will be very infrequently updated...)

• Watchcam photos

• older Thailand travelogue

Just back from tree-hugging around Victoria's national parks; now in Sydney, bodysurfing! Great Barrier Reef next.

(Before I sign off, I have to note NTK calling me an "official NTK hero". How nice is that? Cheers Danny 'n' Dave...)

One last blog. This has to be noted as a worthy aim. Ben writes:

I think it would be mildly amusing if a lot of people were to visit this page and enter star ratings and customer reviews that do a little bit to repay Mr. Myers in kind for what he has so unstintingly given to so, so many people over the years.

Read on for more...

Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 12:38:31 -0800
From: ben walsh (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Kevin Myers

It is an indication of the hidebound and inflexible organisation of "The Irish Times" that they continue to give space -- almost daily! --to Myers to vent his bilious spleen. What is particularly upsetting is that the column is in some ways an inheritor of Myles na gCopaleen's brilliantly witty "Cruskeen Lawn" column. The humour is gone -- Myers' concept of this artform is to invent silly names for organizations which advance opinions he holds in contempt, especially those concerning women. Myers' deep-seated loathing for women and schoolboy paranoia about lesbians and female orgasms is always close to the surface, so he sneers about the "Afro-Lesbian Collective of Limbless Veterans of the Falklands War" when he wants a "politically correct" straw man he can savage. Where Myles was inclusive in his satire; mocking "bores" that we could all recognize aspects of in ourselves and our friends, satirizing real people and events in a humourous and effective way, Myers is all vitriol; removed from any semblance of real life and especially the company of women, he inveighs against imaginery opponents wildly, inaccurately and without the benefit of the scholarship he fondly imagines himself to possess.

What Myers is in favour of is hard to say. His slavish admiration of anything English and upper class is evident in his hatred for the "lower orders", as evidenced by this recent screed in which he fawns over the accomplished Fiennes family by asking why there is no "Sharon Fiennes, aged 23, the mother of seven children, in some tower block in London? She too, no doubt, belongs to the nowharmean linguistic subgroup. Her delightful offspring are of various racial origins, with an uncertain number of fathers (owing to drink having been taken on most of the nights in question, nowharmean; maybe even the odd threesome or two, eeer, wotchadoin, o-aw-righthen, nowharmean). Possible fathers might exceed the dozen, though no one really knows, least of all Sharon, and of course none of these fine lads is paying a single penny in maintenance, no-wharmean."

Ignorant misogyny, racism and snobbishness wrapped up into one piece of vicious, hateful bile: that is the writing of Kevin Myers.

Similarly, a recent clerical controversy inspires in Myers a sudden passion for Christian orthodoxy which we never knew he possessed. Comments by a church Dean questioning the ressurection were deemed so off-the-wall by Father Kevin that he depicted a world turned upside-down as a consequence of the Dean's thinking. And, this being Kevin Myers, the female orgasm had to make an appearance as he talked of a nude Mother Superior herding a group of nuns to: "The Anne Summers sex shop, of course ... Batteries or mains, girls?"

It is sad beyond measure that "The Irish Times" publishes this hateful prattle so often and under the "Irishman's Diary" byline, when an occasional guest opinion piece is all the insight into this sick worldview is more than is called for. Sadder still that a publishing house chose to compile and sell a collection of this output. Beyond comprehension that anyone would buy it.

End Of Bloggage, for now -- updates will be infrequent for the next few months. I'm off! travelling back to Ireland via

• Oz
• NZ
• Bangkok, then overland to Laos and Vietnam (hopefully)
• Nepal, then overland to India
• and finally back to Ireland via Frankfurt

there will be intermittent bloggage 'til then. See y'all soon...

Aaagh! I'm going to be diving in the Great Barrier Reef pretty soon. Gotta avoid this bugger -- having my head chewed by a giant 100-kilo grouper called "Grumpy" is not my idea of fun, let alone when it's 20 metres down.

(The diver said:) It came from underneath me. I never saw it coming. Then it was just 'bang' and I was inside the fish's mouth. It ripped off my regulator but my mask was still on and then, just as suddenly, it let me go. ...

(The dive instructor said:) Giant grouper have very powerful jaws. Grumpy could have crushed Andre's head like a soft peach and snapped his neck like a twig. That's why I think Grumpy was only being playful.

Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 10:01:07 -0000
From: Mark Pilkington (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: "Grumpy was only being playful"

http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,3660475%255E2765,00.html

How I survived being gulped by a giant fish

DOWN IN THE MOUTH: Swedish tourist Andre Ronnlund is lucky to be alive after being swallowed by a giant grouper

FRANK THORNE

27jan02

A MAN who was swallowed by a fish while diving on the Great Barrier Reef has told of how he was "stalked" by the creature which tried to make a meal of him.

Swedish backpacker Andre Ronnlund, 24, thought he was going to die with his head in the mouth of a giant grouper while diving at Yongala, off Townsville, last month.

"In the beginning, it was fun," he said, speaking for the first time of his bizarre ordeal. "Me and my diving buddy had never seen such big fish.

"But then it came right up to within inches of our faces and followed us everywhere we went. I felt it was a little bit threatening and I didn't like it."

Running short of air, Mr Ronnlund decided to signal his diving buddy that he was going to surface.

That's when the 100kg grouper - a local legend called Grumpy estimated to be 80 years old - made his move.

"I was hit from underneath and everything suddenly went black. My breathing gear was shredded. I was inside the mouth of this big fish and I blacked out," he said.

"At first I thought it was a shark. I didn't see it coming. I didn't know what hit me.

"I was as helpless as a prawn on the proverbial barbie and I thought, 'This is it', and I would end my days as fish food.

"I was stuck in its mouth and it was squeezing pretty hard. I felt the blood running down my neck and I couldn't move. I was in great pain, just waiting to die."

Mr Ronnlund was about 20m down when he was attacked.

"It came from underneath me. I never saw it coming. Then it was just 'bang' and I was inside the fish's mouth. It ripped off my regulator but my mask was still on and then, just as suddenly, it let me go."

As he reached for his emergency air supply, Mr Ronnlund had to put the boot in as Grumpy came back for another bite.

"I gave him a kick between his eyes and he swam back towards the bottom."

Mr Ronnlund, who had been blase about stories of the dangers of Australian wildlife, is believed to be the only person to report a grouper attack.

Dive instructor Merv Ruggeri, of Adrenalin Dive company, said Mr Ronnlund was lucky to be alive.

"Giant grouper have very powerful jaws. Grumpy could have crushed Andre's head like a soft peach and snapped his neck like a twig. That's why I think Grumpy was only being playful."

--

Mark Pilkington (spam-protected)

---

"The blood is the life, but electricity is the life of the blood.'' Dr Carter Moffat, 1892

---

--- http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk :Strange Attractor http://www.forteantimes.com :Fortean Times online http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk :Magonia online http://www.kosmische.org :Kosmische Club

The Turkish Star Wars. I reckon this has got to be seen.

What can anyone say? "The Turkish Star Wars" makes film criticism moot. From the early days of the flickering shadow scenes in the Lumiere Brothers's shorts through today's digital cinema, there has never been a film quite like this. Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi...help us!

Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 11:13:05 +0100
From: "Tim Chapman" (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: The Turkish Star Wars

http://www.filmthreat.com/Reviews.asp?File=ReviewsOne.inc&Id=2341

THE TURKISH STAR WARS

by Phil Hall

1982, Un-rated, 85min, Shocking Videos (spam-protected) (10/26/2001)

The Turkish film industry has a curious tradition of appropriating Hollywood classics and remaking them on a budget roughly equivalent to the price of lunch at a neighborhood kebab shop. Devoted readers of Film Threat will recall "The Turkish Wizard of Oz," which tossed the MGM classic over an Istanbul rainbow and into a realm of utter surrealism, and there are also Turkish-based versions of "Star Trek," "Tarzan," "Superman" and even "E.T." lurking about.

However, none of this knowledge could possibly prepare you for the jaw-dropping insanity of "The Turkish Star Wars." This film is not actually a scene-for-scene remake of the George Lucas landmark, although it shamelessly pirated the special effects footage from the 1977 original and tacked it into a feverish nightmare of celluloid dementia which needs to be seen if only to prove how far the minds of lunatic filmmakers can run. Prepare yourself, because the only way to appreciate "The Turkish Star Wars" is to follow the storyline through its labyrinthine lunacy.

Long ago in a Turkish-speaking galaxy far, far away, the universe is being imperiled by a quartet of evildoers: two bush-haired men wearing Mardi Gras costumes, a slutty babe dressed as Cleopatra, and a blue robot with an ambulance light on his head. (I am not making this up...I could not possibly make this up!) Their fleet of spaceships go to war against the flying saucers of a heroic group of rebels, and for several minutes the screen is filled with F/X footage from a battered print of "Star Wars."

... and so forth to the horrid climax: ...

Now it's time for a showdown between our golden gloved good guy and the entire cast of miscreants. A huge rumble takes place in an open field, with the villains getting their heads decapitated left and right. While this is going on , footage from the outer space battles in "Star Wars" is repeated, along with scenes from a film about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. After much derring-do and chopping, the bad guys are vanquished and everyone lives happily ever after. The man with the golden gloves goes back into outer space, leaving his chemically-enhanced blonde lady friend behind to clean up all of the severed heads.

What can anyone say? "The Turkish Star Wars" makes film criticism moot. From the early days of the flickering shadow scenes in the Lumiere Brothers's shorts through today's digital cinema, there has never been a film quite like this. Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi...help us!

Gary Stock @ http://www.unblinking.com/ seems to be running Googlewhacking, originally heard of via a post on 0xdeadbeef:

I've gotten addicted to looking for combinations of common words which have the lowest incidence of appearance on web pages, as indexed by google. So far, I have yet to find a set of two common english words which do not appear together on any web pages...

Gary has taken this, and run (far and wide) with it. So here's my attempt: bearnaise destructor: that scores 10600 x 242000 = 2,565,200,000 points.

BTW, I meant to reply to the 0xdeadbeef posting when it came through. This is really a resurfacing of Net Bullseye, created back in 1998 by Harold Chaput:

You and your friends gather around a web browser and go to AltaVista. Now do a search on two words or phrases. .... The first person who enters a search request that comes back with only one found document is the winner.

It's a lot easier than Googlewhacking, since there was less web out there, back then ;) and the phrase addition makes it easy-peasy. Some of our hits:

• +spindoctor +fertilizer (the hit was some kind of Northern Ireland "Peace Book", appropriately enough)

• +freebase +"pogo stick"

• +sasquatch +"vacuum cleaner hose"

• +inflated +"distributed objects everywhere"

• +"ben walsh" +bum

• +"embarrassing anal leakage" +walsh

• +dinner +"baby's kidneys"

Note the predominance of attempts to slag each other off. I'm particularly proud of my "embarrassing anal leakage" (so to speak), aimed right at Ben Walsh. Bullseye!

Chris Blizzard has a blog. Cool.

Even better, it looks like sub-pixel font rendering will be supported in official Moz builds soon-ish, thanks to some blizzard and keithp hackage.

This is good -- it was seriously looking like it was going to be a 'download third-party RPMs' deal for quite a while, based on the Bugzilla correspondence.

Guardian review of a new book about 18th century scottish sex clubs, via forteana:

The Beggar's Benison, the club to which Stevenson devotes his attention, was dedicated to "the convivial celebration of male sexuality".

Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 16:44:19 -0000
From: "Tim Chapman" (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Great Scottish wankers of history

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,635688,00.html

The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals

David Stevenson

265pp, Tuckwell Press, £18.99

Clubs were one of the 18th century's great inventions. "Clubbable", a word invented by Dr Johnson, was a coinage for the age. For men, the club promised a new form of sociability. Nowadays we associate clubs with reactionary habits, yet once they were self-consciously modern, allowing enlightened gentlemen to socialise outside the narrow confines of family or profession. In a club, men were to express their common rationality and learn social sophistication. And lowland Scotland, whose capital, Edinburgh, was a hub of Enlightenment culture, was the home to many such associations of like-minded citizens.

David Stevenson's mischievous aim is to show that the 18th-century club was not necessarily the polite and proper organisation celebrated in official propaganda. Some clubs were merely "raucous" - the average meeting more stag night than philosophical discussion group - while others were fervently "libertine". The Beggar's Benison, the club to which Stevenson devotes his attention, was dedicated to "the convivial celebration of male sexuality". It was founded in the town of Anstruther in Fife, though it came to have branches in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Its earliest members were customs officers, merchants and affluent craftsmen - leading members of the community. By the end of the century it included churchmen and aristocrats. All were, in their own eyes, modern "defiers of convention", liberated hedonists.

They dined and drank together, delighting in obscene songs and toasts. They had some earnest interest in matters of sex, and texts survive of "lectures" on what we would call sex education. They used the club's stock of pornography and were occasionally entertained by naked "posture girls". And it seems that they indulged in rituals of collective masturbation, participation in this apparently being an initiation procedure.

Masturbation was a preoccupation for the club, and Stevenson remarks that this may speak of the lack of available entertainment in 18th-century Fife. He also makes historical sense of it by describing "the great masturbation panic" that began in the early decades of the 18th century, with physicians in particular warning that onanism was "a major health and social problem". The club's rituals, he thinks, were a reaction against the backwardness of quacks and moralists. Shameless "frigging" was an expression of intellectual freedom.

The evidence of the club's activities includes many odd relics. Among the impedimenta of would-be libertinism are medals depicting naked human figures, plates and bowls with startling genital decorations and seals depicting the club symbol, a phallus with a small bag suspended from it. This made graphic the club's benison: "May prick nor purse ne'er fail you". Forward-looking proponents of commerce, members seem to have been enthusiasts for both free trade and free love. A prize possession was a snuffbox donated by honorary member George IV containing pubic hair from one of his mistresses.

As Stevenson concedes, his theme is not entirely new; associations of Georgian rakes have been described by historians before. Many will know of Sir Francis Dashwood's Medmenham Monks, the so-called "Hell-Fire Club", whose members blasphemously substituted Venus for Christ in parodies of religious worship and cavorted with loose women in the caves of Dashwood's estate.

What Stevenson manages to show is that such associations were, however oddly, some part of Enlightenment culture. Sometimes his enthusiasm to see his libidinous Scottish gentlemen in their proper historical context leads him to pile anecdote and digression promiscuously together. He cannot omit any good story about sex-obsessed Scotsmen, from the obscene versifying of Alexander Robertson in the 1690s to the sexological therapies for which James Graham was imprisoned in the 1780s. But he certainly shows that his 18th-century countrymen were not quite as restrained or "polite" as is usually supposed.

BBC's "The Experiment", a recreation of the Stanford prison experiment, has been halted:

it is clear the participants - particularly those selected to be 'prisoners' rather than 'guards' - were placed under severe levels of stress. Friends of some who took part in the programme .. said that it was more gruelling than they had been expecting.

So, what were they expecting, exactly?

Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 09:46:58 -0000
From: "Tim Chapman" (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Stanford Experiment redux

http://media.guardian.co.uk/bbc/story/0,7521,638266,00.html

BBC halts 'prison experiment'

Matt Wells, media correspondent

Thursday January 24, 2002

The Guardian

When the BBC revealed it was to replicate for television the notorious Stanford experiment, when university students were "imprisoned" to study responses to solitude and oppression, executives said that it would not repeat the brutality of the original.

While the BBC version was approached with far more caution than the 1971 model, which was terminated after six days when the participants' behaviour had degenerated, it appears to have met a similar fate.

Scientists overseeing the BBC project became concerned that the 15 participants' emotional and physical wellbeing was in danger of being compromised, and called a halt before it was due to end.

There is no suggestion that any of the volunteers, incarcerated in a "prison" constructed at Elstree studios in Hertfordshire, came to any lasting harm or that their experiences went beyond what they had been led to expect.

But it is clear the participants - particularly those selected to be "prisoners" rather than "guards" - were placed under severe levels of stress. Friends of some who took part in the programme, called The Experiment and due to be televised on BBC2 in the spring, said that it was more gruelling than they had been expecting.

When the BBC advertised for participants last year, it was clear that The Experiment would be no ordinary documentary. Headed "Do you really know yourself?" the advert asked for volunteers who would take part in a "university-backed social science experiment to be shown on TV", and warned that successful candidates would be exposed to "exercise, tasks, hardship, hunger, solitude and anger".

Only men were asked to apply, money was not offered, and there was no suggestion that participation would lead to fame. Instead, the producers - from the BBC's factual programmes department, not the entertainment division

• promised it would "change the way you think".

The BBC experiment was overseen by two psychologists: Alex Haslam from Exeter University; and Stephen Reicher from St Andrews. An independent "ethical committee" also monitored the project. This committee, it is thought, in consultation with the psychol-ogists, made the decision to terminate the experiment, due to last 10 days, after eight or nine. Philip Zimbardo, who oversaw the original Stanford experiment and later said it should never be repeated, was sceptical when news of the programme first emerged. At Stanford, the boredom of the guards drove them to abuse the prisoners. This abuse included night strip searches, making prisoners clean the toilets with their hands, and tripping prisoners when they walked past. Some prisoners developed signs of emotional instability. He said last year: "That kind of research is now considered to be unethical and should not be redone just for sensational TV and Survivor-type glamour. I am amazed a British university psychology department would be involved.

"Obviously they are doing the study in the hopes that high drama will be created, as in my original study. If not, it will be boring. If so, how will it be terminated and when?"The BBC said that termination of the experiment proved that its security systems had worked. A spokeswoman said a great deal of useful data had been amassed, and no scientific value was lost.

"It was planned that The Experiment would last 10 days but, aware of the stresses under which volunteers might find themselves, the BBC was always prepared, if necessary, to withdraw individuals or end it early. In the event the psychologists did decide to end the experiment earlier than anticipated, but not before a lot of data had been collected."

"The psychologists are confident that the material they have will change the way we think about the nature of power and powerlessness.''

The page cannot be fucking displayed (via FoRK):

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings, but most likely you're a complete dipshit. You tell your friends you've been online since '94, but Mr. "I've been on the net for 5 years" seems to call me a lot at 2 am in the morning and asking what settings you need to put in your outlook express to get your @home e mail, or how do I send something in icq? My favorite moments from you and your friends are when you send me the "I love you virus" or the e mails I get with the jokes that are so not fucking funny I wanna snap your neck like a twig. No I'm not your personal Microsoft hotline, and when I go to your place for dinner, please dont ask me if I could "Just take a look at something" you've been having trouble with. The next time you tell me you pride yourself on how much you've learned about computers over the years, just know that I'm thinking "Bullshit" over and over in my mind ya prick.

Megalithic Sound and Landscape: A research project to investigate whether ancient monuments were built with acoustic effects in mind, and how they related to the landscape around them. (via nutlog)

I've heard of similar theories before, and IMO there's a lot of weight there. Every megalithic monument (well, enclosed ones like caves and barrow graves) in my experience have had great acoustic qualities, and it seems to make sense that in an oral society this would be very important. It's one of my minor obsessions ;)

BTW, ObIrishness: Newgrange is significantly older than Stonehenge: Newgrange was built around 3200BC, Stonehenge about 1000 years later. na na na nah.

However, Stonehenge is the subject of a rocking Tap tune. More Tap:

Nigel: We saw the film that everyone else saw and we were quite upset because it was not a depiction that was accurate. You see someone like Derek not getting out of the pod. Most nights...

Derek: Every night!

Nigel: Well, 80 percent of the time...

Derek: But you don't see that.

Nigel: What they choose to show...

David: They chose to show a time when we couldn't get Derek out of the bloody pod.

Nigel: The night there was some mechanical misfunction and we become the brunt of a joke, and not the smooth act that we really were.

David: Skew, eschew...

Nigel: Basically, it's all twisted. "Let me go into my little editing room and twist."

Derek: What do they call that, McCarthyism?

David: It's called McCarthyism.

Nigel: Charlie McCarthyism.

Derek: I call it DiBergiism.

Nigel: This Is Marty DiBergi should have been the name of the movie.

Slashdot gets all hot and bothered about a 'free energy' hoax. The story in question is titled Irish Inventor Says Cracks World's Energy Needs, which, despite having some awful grammar, contains a clue right there: Irish.

The whole point of the story is the Irishness -- if it was a USAnian inventor, there would be no story, because there'd be no blarney crap like this:

If the Jasker men really are onto something, it could be the most important Irish invention since Guinness.

The days of touch-tone hell are numbered: AT&T's new natural-language-recognition system will fix everything. Aye right, as they say.

Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 06:50:46 -0600
From: "Webmaster" (spam-protected)
To: "Forteana" (spam-protected)
Subject: The days of touch-tone hell might be numbered

http://www.startribune.com/stories/789/1109766.html

AT&T's new help service allows customers to speak freely

Kevin Coughlin

Newhouse News Service

Published Jan 21 2002

The days of touch-tone hell might be numbered.

AT&T gradually is rolling out a new help service to speed customers through the maddening maze of menus -- "Press five for more baffling options" -- that make simple calls an exercise in aggravation.

"How may I help you?" a computer now asks long-distance customers who call with problems.

And four times out of five, according to AT&T, the system actually understands them -- whether they say "This charge is wrong," or "You guys screwed up my bil l."

Then it zips them to the right menu, or to a real person. If the machine's not sure, it asks.

This is the new field of natural-language understanding, in which computers str ive to go beyond recognizing words, to grasp their meaning.

"Natural language, as opposed to speech recognition, is a big deal," said Nigel Beck of IBM Voice Systems. T. Rowe Price is using an IBM system that talks wit h customers based on a 250,000-word vocabulary and 33,000 finance-related phras es, Beck said.

"Natural-language systems are right where the frontier is in call routing," sai d James Flanagan, director of the Rutgers Center for Advanced Information Proce ssing.

'Voice tone' on the way

Researchers at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., say that "How may I help you?" is a precursor to "voice tone." Before long, they say, folks will scrap telepho ne touchpads, computer keyboards and TV remotes, and simply tell their devices what to do.

Like "Star Trek." Or the Bell System, circa 1900.

In those days, said Jay Wilpon, manager for speech processing at the labs, cust omers told an operator what they wanted.

"Now, the onus is on you to figure out how to navigate information using 12 but tons on the telephone," Wilpon lamented.

Once the kinks are worked out, AT&T plans to retire its numbered menus. Then it might repackage "How may I help you?" for other industries. Imagine airline sc hedules, restaurant listings or weather reports without having to speak in code , as most computerized phone systems now require.

"You don't have to say any magic words," said Douglas Shurts, who oversees the AT&T program. "We have taught the computer to understand what customers are say ing, and how they are saying it."

In the future, AT&T Labs aims to perfect a wireless computer tablet that respon ds to spoken or scribbled queries for directions and listings.

"How may I help you?" is possible largely thanks to faster computers and expand ing databases.

Speedy computers now test software in minutes instead of months. Vast databases "teach" the machines hundreds of thousands of words, plus expressions culled f rom thousands of actual customer calls.

Conversational difficulty

Since 1992, AT&T has used voice recognition to route billions of collect and ca lling-card calls, saving the company up to $300 million a year. Callers are pro mpted what to say, and the computer listens for those words, a technique called "word spotting."

But following conversations is much harder for machines. They trip over "ums," "ahems," choppy grammar and colloquial expressions.

AT&T's system ignores most of what's said, listening for about 3,200 words that pertain to phone issues such as billing and directory assistance. From combina tions of these words, as learned from actual conversations, it attempts to glea n a caller's intent.

"You're never going to get 60 million people to talk the way you want them to t alk. For us, 'natural' is the way our customers talk," said Allen Gorin, natura l-language guru at AT&T Labs.

"The crux of that is: Collect a large amount of data about what people actually say, learn what the salient phrases are and decipher the meaning of those. It' s a mathematical and machine-learning problem," he said.

Tests began about five years ago with 30,000 U.S. customers, and a national rol lout in selected markets began in August. The service is not yet available for business or international customers and works only from phones the network reco gnizes as AT&T residential customers.

Shurts said AT&T wants to make sure everything is up to speed. So far, so good.

Complaints about customer service are down 65 percent since the program was lau nched, Shurts said. He said it's one-third more accurate than the old system, w here callers had to grope through as many as five automated menus and 25 choice

The new service shaves off about 30 seconds, he said, and ascertains the caller 's intent about 80 percent of the time.

A spokesman said this might thin the ranks of customer service representatives, through attrition, but he said the goal is to free them up for tough calls.

The program still stumbles over accents, odd expressions and background noises. Wireless and cable-TV calls were puzzling, too, at first.

Hmm. I think I've just fixed a bug in WebMake which was screwing up dependencies and change detection on this blog. Let's see...

The Onion seems to be back on form:

Confused Marines Capture Al-Jazeera Leader

DOHA, QATAR-- In a daring effort to dismantle the vast Arab network, a company of confused Marines raided Al-Jazeera headquarters Monday and captured leader Mohammed Abouzeid. "Al-Jazeera has ties to virtually every country in the Arab world, and this guy was the key to their whole operation," Lt. Warren Withers said. "Nothing went through the Al-Jazeera communications array without his go-ahead."

Poorly lit stairways, rickety bed frames, dirty sex aids and repetitive movement injuries are among the chief dangers brothel workers face in New South Wales.

Happy 2nd birthday to Boing Boing! Mark and Cory get big linky points, every day. Dunno how they do it.

To help celebrate, I've given 'em top billing on my daily reading list above (new feature!)

Hmm. WTF is this "WAR ON THE WORLD - I FORESAW IT" crap? The ghost in the WebMake machine? Sounds like a Pravda headline to me.

Ah well, since I'm about to go off travelling for 4 months it's unlikely I'm going to get to fix it ;)

Adobe's AlterCast is attracting some attention from the CMS community:

AlterCast is imaging server software designed to integrate with existing content management systems and help maintain the ocean of graphics used in e-commerce sites like Amazon.com and Outpost.com. It automates the creation and repurposing of pictures and eliminates the repetitive nature of tweaking and reformatting them for various needs.

AlterCast is installed on a server (Sun Solaris or Windows NT/2000) and scripts are created by developers so that key layers of Photoshop documents can be edited dynamically from within the user interface. Scripts can be developed to handle almost any need. A single image can be repurposed for high resolution print, Web optimization, and even wireless devices. Creative scripting can weasel its way in too. A script could be created so that after someone has visited a product three times on a site, a special starburst appears over the image that says, "Now 52 percent less!" just to close the deal.

It would, of course, be a piece of piss to write a WebMake plugin which uses the Gimp's perl bindings to do this.

Also worth noting is that Roxen supports this out-of-the-box with the <gtext> and <gh> tags.

All Adobe have added is some commercial polish (always welcome though) and bindings to the PSD doc format. Presumably they'll probably add some built-in support in Photoshop, too.

From the IrelandOffline forum, (Irish premier Bertie) Ahern in bid to beat telecoms threat to economy:

Mr Ahern said Ireland is lagging

saik said:

bertie is in with the online gaming massive

LOL. The real Bertie quotes are here.

It's good to see the government finally doing something when Ireland came in 27th out of 30 OECD countries in a recent survey on access to broadband, but I'll believe this when I see it happening. A leaked document is not a policy statement, especially when there's an election coming up.

Just got a mail about SpamAssassin from Aaron Swartz, noted RDF guy. He runs a very interesting blog called swhack, which I've seen cited before, but never visited for some reason. Now I have, and it's on the bookmarks list ;)

Anyway, the main reason for blogging this is this blog item about a story called Darwin Goes Digital, which is quite a nice intro to genetic programming:

... genetic programming (GP) , developed over the last decade by John Koza and his colleagues at Stanford University. Instead of starting with a set of guesses for the solution to a problem, GP begins with guesses for the actual method that best solves the problem. These are usually stated as random groups of instructions written in Lisp, a programming language able to cope with the cross-breeding and mutation demanded by the GP approach.

Interestingly though, the first time I heard about GP-style techniques was in Tierra, Tom Ray's Darwinian OS:

The Tierra C source code creates a virtual computer and its Darwinian operating system, whose architecture has been designed in such a way that the executable machine codes are evolvable. This means that the machine code can be mutated (by flipping bits at random) or recombined (by swapping segments of code between algorithms), and the resulting code remains functional enough of the time for natural (or presumably artificial) selection to be able to improve the code over time.

Along with the C source code which generates the virtual computer, we provide several programs written in the assembler code of the virtual computer. Some of these were written by a human and do nothing more than make copies of themselves in the RAM of the virtual computer. The others evolved from the first, and are included to illustrate the power of natural selection.

This system results in the production of synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the ``energy" resource and memory is the ``material" resource. Memory is organized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different genotypes compete for CPU time and memory space.

Diverse ecological communities have emerged. These digital communities have been used to experimentally examine ecological and evolutionary processes: e.g., competitive exclusion and coexistence, host/parasite density dependent population regulation, the effect of parasites in enhancing community diversity, evolutionary arms race, punctuated equilibrium, and the role of chance and historical factors in evolution. This evolution in a bottle may prove to be a valuable tool for the study of evolution and ecology.

It was very exciting to see artificial evolution techniques actually work in this way, as if operating on a real genotype (have to be careful w.r.t. terminology here, Catherine's a zoologist and gets very peeved about this stuff). Unfortunately, Tierra development seems to have stalled since then.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: The Satanic visitation that began with a bloody killing on July 6 ended prematurely for Manuela Ruda and her husband, Daniel Ruda:

She says they went to cemeteries at night, climbed around ruins, talked about this and that, and drank blood -- their own blood, or that from so-called givers. Would-be drinkers of blood can find willing givers on the Internet, Mrs. Ruda says, explaining: "You just have to be careful not to hit an artery." Givers are happy to offer their arms or legs for a bite, she says.

According to her story, it was around this time that she had her incisors removed and replaced with longer, sharper implanted teeth identical to those seen in vampire films. She dedicated her soul to the service of Satan and swore to accept his "every word" as law. Mrs. Ruda says she tried therapy but stopped, out of fear that she would be locked up if she revealed what she was really like.

Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 14:57:37 -0800
From: Brian Chapman (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Murder Suspects Express Sympathy for the Devil

http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FCC-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={617FC000-5325-4826-85A7-C4ACB7D25F59}

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung | 18 Jan 2002

Murder Suspects Express Sympathy for the Devil

By Karin Truscheit

BOCHUM. The Satanic visitation that began with a bloody killing on July 6 ended prematurely for Manuela Ruda and her husband, Daniel Ruda.

Plan A, Plan B and Plan C all failed. After they beat Frank Hackerts to death with a hammer and stabbed his body several dozen times, Plan A was to slash their own wrists, they say. Plan B was to drive to Denmark, get a gun and shoot themselves. Plan C was to fill up the trunk with diesel fuel canisters and then have a head-on collision with a truck.

All three suicide plans failed because, as the couple say, Satan chose to end his possession of them too soon. Instead of dying, the couple ended up driving back and forth across Germany. They changed tires, withdrew some money from a bank in Hannover and headed east.

The couple finally ended up in the hands of the police, who arrested them on July 12 in Jena, a city in the eastern state of Thuringia. Six months later, the Rudas are on trial in the western city of Bochum, where they are providing detailed descriptions about their motivations for killing Mr. Hackerts.

Everything started out so well. Sometime around last March, Mr. Ruda says he received four numbers in a vision: 6,6,6,7. Their significance was obvious, to him. The couple would marry on June 6, or 6/6. And on the 6th of July, or 6/7, they were to kill themselves after first carrying out a "sacrifice" to the dark lord. The purpose of the marriage was to guarantee legally that "our remains could be buried together." As for sacrificing a victim to Satan, whom they both claim to serve, the couple had been toying with the idea for some time.

Choosing the victim was easy. Mr. Ruda's coworker, Mr. Hackerts, known to his friends as Hacki, "was always so funny" and therefore seemed like the perfect candidate for "court jester" to the dark lord, according to a written statement by Mr. Ruda, 26.

Mr. Hackerts, 33, was anything but a Satanist. A "nice guy," he maintained contact with the couple after many other people refused to associate with them. Together with Mr. Ruda, he sold car accessories at a parts dealer in Herten, a city located just north of Bochum in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Mr. Ruda apparently succeeded so well in separating his private from professional life that no one at the store wondered about any thoughts, desires or fantasies he might have had while selling bumpers and side mirrors.

Allowing a glance into his emotional world, Mr. Ruda wrote in his statement that he realized at an early age that he was Satan's messenger of death. He hated people, and things like embraces disgusted him, the statement says. After original "visions" at the age of 13 or 14, he began to explore the dark side of his soul and later had fantasies of slaughtering people and "bloody dreams," as he wrote in the confession. He discovered "religious deviations" and the Satanist bible, then took out a classified ad in a scene magazine. Manuela answered it.

They met and liked each other. It was a "harmony of souls," says Mr. Ruda in the statement, which stresses that he rejects the "terrestrial lust" of sex.

Mrs. Ruda, 23, also says she discovered her brand of Satanism at a very early age. Elementary school was normal, but she dropped out after the 10th grade because "the others" could not deal with her and she could not deal with them. Deciding she did not fit into this world, she tried to give herself "an overdose of H," heroin, at age 14.

It did not work. She took a few jobs and went to demonstrations "against everything." She traveled to Scotland in 1996 and spent some time in London, where she discovered a club visited by "vampires" and other people. She could tell they were vampires because they were "extremely sensitive to light." Returning to Germany in 1997, she worked at cafs and led an increasingly isolated life, studying "chaos magic" and preferring the company of vampires and their friends.

She says they went to cemeteries at night, climbed around ruins, talked about this and that, and drank blood -- their own blood, or that from so-called givers. Would-be drinkers of blood can find willing givers on the Internet, Mrs. Ruda says, explaining: "You just have to be careful not to hit an artery." Givers are happy to offer their arms or legs for a bite, she says.

According to her story, it was around this time that she had her incisors removed and replaced with longer, sharper implanted teeth identical to those seen in vampire films. She dedicated her soul to the service of Satan and swore to accept his "every word" as law. Mrs. Ruda says she tried therapy but stopped, out of fear that she would be locked up if she revealed what she was really like.

In the courtroom on Wednesday, she wore black sunglasses to match her black hair as she sat at the defendants' table. The presiding judge allowed her to wear the glasses after rejecting her request that the lights be turned down in the courtroom. Her lawyer asked the court ts be understanding on this point because his client had lived nocturnally and slept during the day. And her chosen place of sleep was usually a coffin.

In the courtroom, she revealed plenty of tattooed skin and posed for photographers like an ill-tempered movie star, raising her hand in a "devil's sign" for the next day's newspapers.

As the trial proceeded, the court heard the details of the crime spelled out in the defendants' confessions. Mr. Ruda claims that he was already in a mental haze when he went to Mrs. Ruda's apartment in Witten, east of Bochum, last July 6. His perceptions "seemed distant" because Satan had taken over his body, according to the statement. He says he later saw Mr. Hackerts lying on the floor, a pentagram carved in his abdomen, but this was the only thing he says he remembers of that day.

His wife's memory is more detailed. She says the couple spent most of the day "just hanging out." She took a short rest in her coffin before they wrote farewell letters to their family and friends. At 6 p.m., they picked up Mr. Hackerts, whom they had invited to a party at her place. As they entered, she says she felt a "force field" and the presence of "entities."

"We were no longer alone," Mrs. Ruda says.

Satan took possession of them as they sat on the couch, she says. Mr. Ruda got up and left the room. When he returned, surrounded by a "flickering aura," he hit Mr. Hackerts over the head with a hammer, Mrs. Ruda says. Mr. Hackerts staggered to his feet. She says a mysterious light suddenly revealed a knife on the windowsill and a voice gave her the order: "Stab him in the heart!" She grabbed the knife and went to work.

Mr. Hackerts was stabbed 66 times, according to the medical examiner's report. A forensics specialist who testified Thursday said that the couple used many different objects in killing their victim. Police confiscated one short knife, a carpet cutter and a machete. When Mr. Hackerts could no longer move, they used a scalpel to cut a pentagram into his stomach. At that point, "the visitation" came to an end. They packed their things, fled in the car and waited for more orders.

Since Mrs. Ruda would prefer not to answer any questions in court, her lawyer assisted her confession with a few queries designed to reveal her mental state. "What do you say about the prosecution's accusation that you committed an act of murder," the lawyer asked.

"We are not murderers," she replied. "It wasn't meant in a bad way. We wanted to release his soul from the hateful flesh, so that he can serve Satan. It was in his own best interest. We only followed orders."

She insisted that she and her husband liked Mr. Hackerts, and that his killing was nothing personal. "Hacki is still here," she said, although he was no longer visible. Well within view, the victim's parents sat across from her in the court. They showed no emotion as they listened to the woman with the sunglasses talk about their dead son.

A police detective, Franz Sobolewski, gave the court a different view of the couple's actions. He said he interrogated Mrs. Ruda after the couple was arrested in Jena, and that both told police that Mr. Hackerts had been killed with a single blow and that the stabbings were a spontaneous act. Then they sliced open the victim's forearms as a "rehearsal" of their own suicides.

"Suddenly, they realized that killing someone is not that simple, that it was monstrous and brutal," Mr. Sobolewski testified. "They didn't want to repeat that with themselves. They did not have the courage."

During the interrogation, Mrs. Ruda cried because, she said, Satan had abandoned her. At the time, she added that she would gladly take it all back.

LoTR screenplay summarised:

INT. IAN HOLM'S COMICALLY SMALL HOME

IAN MCKELLEN enters, hitting his head on objects.

IAN HOLM

There you are, you sage old wizard!

They smoke from IAN MCKELLEN'S PIPE.

IAN HOLM (CONT'D)

Ah, Ian, you truly have the finest

weed in Middle Earth.

IAN MCKELLEN

Heh. Both of our names are Ian.

IAN HOLM

Holy shit! You're right!

IAN HOLM falls backwards, laughing hysterically.

A 'Where are they now?' of UK '80's musicians from the Grauniad. What a mess!

Adam Ant

Remind me: In the early 80s, Adam Ant (real name Stuart Goddard) was a self-styled dandy highwayman. He wore a tricorn hat, brandished a pair of flintlocks, and painted a horizontal white stripe across his nose long before sporting professionals made the same fashion statement. Ant's music borrowed the post-punk fetish for Burundi drumming that made Malcolm McLaren's Bow Wow Wow briefly popular, and was wedded to lyrics that proselytised in favour of dressing up and bigging it up in an unprecedentedly large manner. ...

Where is he now? The secure Alice ward of the Royal Free Hospital in north London, where he is detained for his own protection and the safety of others under section two of the 1983 Mental Health Act.

New layout. Hope you like it! There seems to be a bit of rogue metadata on the loose that's changing the title to something bizarre, though ;)

Affogato! This month's pics from the Watchcam are now up, featuring:

• an exceptionally bullshitty pic from the Ned Kelly Turdsperience,

• a giant Ned Kelly,

• a not-very-big "Big Cherry",

• some bizarre peg-men from Geelong,

• and the weathercock. Your guess is as good as mine.

CNN: "A plaque intended to honor black actor James Earl Jones at a Florida celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, instead paid tribute to James Earl Ray, the man who killed the black civil rights leader, officials said Wednesday. ... the erroneous plaque read: " Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive"." Whoops. Not everyone can make that bad a mistake.

Well, I've just added archives to the blog -- about time too. Hopefully this will help keep http://taint.org/ fresh and sweet-smelling.

Students describe John Walker as bumbling zealot:

John Walker bumbled his way through his first trip to the Middle East, unwittingly insulting other Muslims and repeatedly getting into trouble with authorities, say those who encountered the Marin teen-ager in Yemen. ...

Josh Mortensen, another student, said from Cairo that Walker asked peers to call him Suleiman, affected a "bogus" Arabic accent and wore traditional Muslim garb unlike that of most Yemenis. Other foreign students at the school mockingly nicknamed him "Yusuf Islam," the name pop singer Cat Stevens took when he became a Muslim and rejected his music career. ...

Islamic experts said that in his naivete, Walker, a baptized Roman Catholic who converted to Islam at 16, fell into a trap so common that Mohammed himself predicted it.

"A person who might have been living a typical happy-go-lucky life and then he really gets very much attracted to the teaching of Islam and its ideal, but then he wants to change overnight - that's what the prophet actually was teaching against," said Jamal Badawi of the Islamic Information Foundation in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "He said, 'Go gently."'

"A wayward weighing machine that told a woman she was a fat pig and told a man than he was a fat * * * * has been removed from a Melbourne shopping centre." Hmm, hidden keyboard eh?

Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 11:55:59 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: The War on Fat goes High Tech

----- (from The Courier Mail (Brisbane) 16.1.02)

FAT QUIPS ON SCALES WEAR THIN by Kelly Ryan

It was anything but just the ticket.

A wayward weighing macine that told a woman she was a fat pig and told a man than he was a fat * * * * (spaces inserted to keep Rob's ISP happy- pd) has been removed from a Melbourne shopping centre.

Red-faced operators pulled the plug on the renegade scales after furious complaints about offensive comments it added to personal weight details.

The coin-operated scales are programmed to print a person's height, weight and body mass details.

Bruce Hamilton was stunned to read that while his weight was up slightly, the ticket also told him he was a fat * * * *.

The Body Weight Machine was removed at dawn yesterday. Supplier Ian Sargent believes it was maliciously tampered with.

Mr Sargent said tickets usually carried "nice" messages such as "Happy Christmas" or "Happy New Year".

He said it appeared someone had seen a technician use a password to access the hidden keyboard under the pad where the messages were changed.

-----

peter

coming soon - wormman.net . . . the horror . . . the horror

Inevitable: Harry PotHead.

Joel @ rathergood.com's made a Flash video for Destiny's Child which is worth a look -- you might need knowledge of UKian TV for this one -- http://www.rathergood.com/alf/ . (fwded by Stewart Smith from forteana)

Japanese youth getting rowdy at their 'coming of age' ceremonies.

Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 09:27:32 -0000
From: "Martin Adamson" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Drunken Japanese youths ruin coming of age rituals

The Electronic Telegraph

Drunken Japanese youths ruin coming of age rituals

By Colin Joyce in Tokyo

(Filed: 15/01/2002)

DRUNKEN youths disrupted Japan's annual coming of age ceremonies yesterday, adding to concerns that the younger generation do not share the traditional Japanese values of courtesy and patience.

Japanese women celebrate at the coming of age ceremony in Tokyo The ceremonies are intended to mark the attainment of adulthood by those who turned 20 in the last 12 months. In recent years, however, the events have become a painful annual reminder of the growing gap between the generations.

In Naha city, on the southern island of Okinawa, seven people were arrested after youths drove through a police barricade in an attempt to bring a barrel of sake to the ceremony. Scuffles followed and 200 riot police were eventually deployed.

Takeshi Onaga, the mayor of Naha, said: "These stupid antics really leave me feeling sad and pained."

Older Japanese observed their own coming of age ceremonies in respectful silence. Most recall it as an important rite of passage, though not necessarily because of the ceremony itself.

For many young women it represents the first opportunity to wear their elaborate, and breathtakingly expensive, full kimonos. While most women still wear their kimonos, a large number of the new adults sport hair dyed an orange-blond.

Yesterday, youths cheerfully swigged from huge sake bottles for television cameras, while others gave interviews in the deliberately rough street speech that older Japanese find boorish and inelegant.

Arrests marred ceremonies in several other cities. In Miyazaki, several youths set off firecrackers during the national anthem.

In Aomori, northern Japan, two boys mounted the stage and threw mayonnaise at each other before running off. Elsewhere, speeches were disrupted by hecklers.

It surprises no one that the new adults indulge in some drinking, but older Japanese say that in their day they waited until after the official business before getting drunk.

The Japanese believe that the virtues of respect for other people and patience are what make their society work so there is great disappointment that many youths are unable to sit through the ceremonies without chatting on their mobile telephones.

Sympathisers point out that the ceremonies are typified by boring and lengthy speeches but attempts to liven up events have led to some cringingly embarrassing scenes.

In Urayasu city, outside Tokyo, young people chose to fete their emergence as adults by dancing with Mickey and Minnie Mouse at nearby Disneyland. The generational change may be partly explained by the fact that 20-year-old Japanese today are further than ever before from the trappings of adulthood.

Ninety per cent still live at home and are economically dependent on their parents. A prolonged recession has damned many to low-paying, part-time jobs with little responsibility.

The average age of marriage and parenthood has risen by several years in the space of a generation. A survey showed that three quarters of 20-year-olds do not feel themselves to be adults.

Lovely user support, a la Smoothwall. One of the /. comments notes:

I have visited irc.smoothwall.org only once. I do feel, however, that my experience there alone was almost enough to discourage my use of the product. I joined the #smoothwall channel in hopes that I might find answers from knowledgable users or developers that I had been unable to find in any of the available documentation (all of which I read in its entirety).

Upon joining the channel, I was bombarded with the omnipresent topic, "Welcome to #smoothwall :: Please do not expect free support if you haven't donated. http://redirect.smoothwall.org/donate "

Ignoring the blatantly anti-open-source sentiment, I proceeded to ask about features and functionality that I feel are paramount to implementation of a device designed to secure my entire network. Before anyone so much as regarded my first question, I was bombarded with "Have you paid yet?" A simple 'not yet' got me my first response: "Can't you read the f**king topc?!"

Of course, I wasn't looking for support -- simply answers to questions about the products capabilities. Off to a great start.

Quite a few of the other comments say pretty much the same thing. IPCop is a fork of the code. Use that instead, I reckon.

I used to think that geocaching sounded a bit silly -- but after visiting Glenrowan's astonishingly cruddy animatronic-fest that is Ned Kelly's Last Stand, this looks like it would have been a bit of fun by comparison.

The wineries had to suffice instead. Mmmm, booze. And -- very surprisingly for a country town -- Benalla's art gallery was really excellent.

BTW, this bloggage is quite funny about the whole "Ned Kelly Country" thing. Just be thankful he didn't pay the 15 bucks to see Ned Kelly's Last Stand; it's the most overpriced, so-bad-it's-not-even-funny-anymore tourist trap I've ever seen. I have a feeling cgregory would just have chucked a heart attack, there and then.

Mr Bowron said the hotel was negligent in 'Allowing or permitting the use of pork chops as footwear in circumstances that the defendant knew or should have known that such use would have produced a hidden trap and did so produce such hidden trap'.

Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 12:17:44 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Carrying on like a . . .

----- (from The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 15.1.02)

http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,3591032%255E3163,00.html

Pub sued over greasy floor By LORNA KNOWLES Court Reporter 15jan02

DRUNKEN hotel patron Ross Lucock came up with a novel use for the humble pork chop when the bar manager told him to put his shoes on.

Having just won a meat tray, the prankster strapped two juicy cuts to his feet and paraded around the Jannali Inn, leaving a trail of grease behind him.

About two hours later, another hotel patron, Troy Michael Bowron, walked across the tiled floor and allegedly slipped on pork fat, breaking his arm and shoulder.

The 24-year-old upholsterer is now suing Mr Lucock and the Jannali Inn for more than $260,000 in the NSW District Court.

Mr Bowron alleges the hotel failed to maintain a clean and safe premises for its patrons.

(sig material imminent)

In a statement of claim, Mr Bowron said the hotel was negligent in: "Allowing or permitting the use of pork chops as footwear in circumstances that the defendant knew or should have known that such use would have produced a hidden trap and did so produce such hidden trap".

Mr Bowron told the court he had lost 15 per cent of the use of his left upper arm as a result of the accident.

The Jannali Inn has filed a cross claim against Mr Lucock and Paul Da Costa, a patron it claims pushed Mr Bowron to the ground.

Mr Lucock, 31, admits he strapped the chops to his feet with masking tape, helped by another man in the bar.

He recalled the chop bones cutting into his feet, telling The Daily Telegraph: "I've still got the scars."

"There was a whole series of hijinx that night, a whole crowd of footballers. What happened, happened."

Mr Bowron's barrister Frank Stevens told the court on November 20 1997 a group of drinkers on the second floor of the hotel became rowdy after winning the meat tray.

"It appears there was great joviality among the drinkers . . . following which some person in authority was attracted to that area by the uproar," Mr Stevens said.

"He pointed out to one of the party that in fact he didn't have anything on his feet . . . and certain suggestions were made about what to do.

"One of the party strapped some pork chops, which were in the meat tray, on his feet and he started moving around the area in which the pool tables were situated on the second floor."

Mr Stevens said once handled, pork chops became very greasy.

"Pork fat from the chops became strewn across the floor and made it inherently dangerous for anyone to proceed and walk on that floor," he said.

Mr Stevens sought to amend his client's statement of claim, increasing the damages to $260,000.

Judge Anthony Puckeridge told Mr Lucock, who appeared for himself, that he should find himself a lawyer.

"If I was in your position, the red light would be flashing,'' Judge Puckeridge warned.

The case was adjourned for directions to February 25.

-----

peter

Wow! Lossy zip compression reduces all files down to 10% or even 0% of their original size! The FAQ:

It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's. It then sorts the remaining bits into increasing order, and begins searching for patterns. The number of passes in this search is set to (10-N) in lzip, where N is the numeric command-line argument we've been telling you about.

For every pattern of length (10/N) found in the data set, the algorithm makes a mark in its hash table. By keeping the hash table small, we can reduce memory overhead. Lzip uses a two-entry hash table. Then data in this table is then plotted in three dimensions, and a discrete cosine transform transforms it into frequency and amplitude data. This data is filtered for sounds that are beyond the range of the human ear, and the result is transformed back (via an indiscrete cosine) into the hash table, in random order.

Take each pattern in the original data set, XOR it with the log of it's entry in the new hash table, then shuffle each byte two positions to the left and you're done!

And you can see, there is some very advanced thinking going on here. It is no wonder this algorithm took so long to develop!

Very impressive! ;) (fwded by Joe on the ILUG list)

Some really useful tips for business travellers in Ireland. These are pure horseshit, by the way:

• Pointing is accomplished by using the head or chin, rather than the fingers. (jm: if you're an actor in The Quiet Man, that is)

• The peace sign or "V" made by extending the index and middle finger with the palm facing out, is an obscene gesture in Ireland and should be avoided.

• If you are referred to as "plain," there is no need to take offense; this is actually an affectionate term, meaning that you are "one of" the Irish. (jm: never heard of anything even vaguely similar to this)

And these were probably true about 30 years ago:

• Welcome Topics of Conversation: drink; the economy, especially positive aspects; the weather - be aware that rain is viewed positively here (jm: since when?!)

• You will find that potatoes are a very important part of meals in Ireland. Fish is also popular.

• Serving bread with meals is not part of Irish culture. You may see an object on the dining table resembling a bread and butter dish, but this is actually a receptacle for placing discarded, boiled potato skins. (jm: no comment needed here I think)

<bigwig> is a really interesting new design for web services. A month or 2 ago, I was thinking about web app languages, like perl/CGI, PHP, servlets, HTML::Mason, etc., and I realised that the big problem was the requirement imposed by the web environment itself; most "interesting" operations often have a UI that needs to take place over several pages, and each page has to

• unmarshal the user's CGI params, decode them, check them for insecurity, validity etc.;

• open the database;

• perform actions;

• fill out the HTML template (I'm assuming nobody's insane enough to still use embedded HTML-in-code!);

• insert "next step" form data in that template;

• send that back to the user;

• save a little state to the database;

• then exit, and forget all in-memory state.

When compared to most interactive programs now, it's clear that this is a totally different, and much more laborious, way to write code. The nearest thing in trad apps is the "callback" way to deal with non-blocking I/O, ie. what we used before we could (a) use threads (b) use processes or (c) wrap it up in a more friendly library to do that. It just screams complexity.

<bigwig> fixes that:

Rather than producing a single HTML page and then terminating as CGI scripts or Servlets, each session thread may involve multiple client interactions while maintaining data that is local to that thread.

They call it The Session-Centered Approach.

It gets better. They also include built-in support for input validation, HTML output validation, compilation and compile-time code checking, and it's GPLed free software. This is really good stuff. Next time I have to write a web app, I'll be using this.

Found via sweetcode.

Dandy highwayman causes trouble in a pub in that London. Stand and deliver!

I can sympathise with Leonard; I just had a wisdom tooth extracted on Saturday and (argh) have had to give up cigarettes for a few days to avoid the dreaded "Dry Socket" (sadly, this is nothing like a "dry pair"). Dammit, I want a cigarette! Must... resist...

Still, the no cigs and raw-hole-where-a-tooth-was bit is the worst part. The extraction was quite painless.

I considered taking a pic of the offending tooth (complete with plentiful decay and 3, count 'em, 3 roots), but then decided that would completely gross out the fledgling taint.org readership.

BTW I do not know why quite a few of the web pages dealing with dry sockets refer to them as "exquisitely painful". Maybe The Little Shop of Horrors was right about dentists.

Boo. Jon Johansen -- the Norwegian teenager who broke the DVD CSS copy protection scheme -- has been indicted by the Norwegian "white collar crime unit". He could get "six months in jail if Johansen gained illegitimate access to data", and "up to two years in prison for having caused damage by gaining such access or for having done so with a financial motivation." Found via rc3.org.

NSync dropped from new Star Wars movie: Joey Fatone rang a Florida radio station to say the scene has been scrapped ... "because people made a big deal about it. We're not going to be in it and I'm not going to comment on it any more."

The movie's going to suck regardless ;)

Great article at Salon.com about changing prorities for academia; money-making over public benefit.

In the 1980s, computer scientists at Berkeley ... created an improved version of the Unix operating system, complete with a networking protocol called the TCP/IP stack. ... In 1992, Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as open-source code, and the combination quickly became the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call it, simply, "the Internet."

Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent act fitting for one of the world's great public universities. But Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.

You could not make it up. It seems Ballymena councillor Robin Stirling, has accused UTV (Ulster Television) of sending viewers subliminal messages promoting Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. From IrishNews.com via forteana.

Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 19:02:35 -0000
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: The voice of reason

http://www.irishnews.com/current/politics1.html

UTV sent subliminal message: DUP man

By Maeve Connolly

---

A DUP councillor has accused UTV of sending viewers subliminal messages promoting Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.

Ballymena councillor Robin Stirling says Gerry Adams features more prominently in the opening sequence of UTV news bulletins than any other politician and has compiled statistics he claims prove his point.

Mr Stirling has video-tape evidence and freeze-frame photographs of the on-screen images and is prepared to visit Havelock House to meet UTV representatives.

"The figures I analysed and was able to pick out were Tony Blair occupying 3.5 per cent of the screen, as compared to Gerry Adams at 21 per cent," Mr Stirling said.

In a letter sent to UTV in December, Mr Stirling claimed the station was using 'perceptual psychology' similar to that previously employed in undemocratic regimes such as Romania and the former Soviet Union.

Mr Stirling said UTV had reassured him it was changing the graphic sequence, but he dismissed as irrelevant claims it was an "issue of artistic impression".

"They were very pleasant but they're not seeing what I'm seeing," the councillor said.

He said he had not received support from all members of Ballymena borough council when he raised the matter at Monday night's meeting and produced a three ft by two ft photographic montage to back his argument.

"People's perception vary depending on their tolerance level.

"There are people on the council who wouldn't be too worried what appears on their screens. Their idea is if you don't like it turn it off, but I don't know if that is really addressing an issue," he said.

Last night a UTV spokeswoman said the news graphics had no political intentions.

"The montage of political figures which councillor Stirling refers to is not a political statement but an artistic sequence with a comprehensive range of images to ensure no political bias," she said.

Fellow Ballymena councillor Lexie Scott said he supported Mr Stirling's right to take issue with what he saw but expressed concern at the council being seen as trying to impose political control over the media.

The Ulster Unionist said the image of Mr Adams comprised approximately one second of a five-second clip and the montage swept over a large number of politicians.

"I think the vast majority of people in Ballymena are unlikely to be unduly influenced by a photograph of any politician, but especially of Mr Adams," Mr Scott said.

The SDLP's PJ McAvoy dismissed the matter as "frivolous and trivial", adding that there were more important matters for Ballymena borough council to discuss.

"I'm sure all television companies do things in a very fair minded way and don't set out purposefully to provoke," Mr McAvoy said.

"At the end of the day all these people are prominent figures in the news.

"If some people seem to see a split-second flash of one person more than another I don't really think it's worth discussing," he added.

Here's that VR tour of an abandoned US ICBM silo which J.G. Ballard mentioned. Don't mind the authentic 1995 background GIFs, frames, and big navigation buttons; it's an amazing site, full of great little observations like:

Note that all of the overhead lights in the facility are mounted on shock-resistant springs so that if the complex were bombed, the ground could shake without burning out the lightbulbs.

Kevin Kelm and his co-explorer certainly did their homework and explored the silo thoroughly, and the descriptions read like an adventure game. Very spooky!

Cory at BB does it again... I don't know where he finds 'em, but the animated GIF cartoons on this page are really neat; hand-drawn, black-and-white manga featuring what appears to be Killer Chicken Man (or something. hmm... I could really do with some subtitles ;).

Caganers, Catalonian shitting figurines, are getting in trouble in a California museum.

Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2002 10:45:29 -0000
From: "Tim Chapman" (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Caganers defended

Defecating Figurines Part Of Holiday

Tuesday January 8, 2002 9:40 AM

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) - Placing statuettes of defecating people in Nativity scenes is a Christmastime tradition so old and so strong in Spain's Catalonia region that even the Roman Catholic Church here doesn't dare try to ban it.

When an exhibit of the figurines in a California museum sparked an angry denunciation from a Catholic group in the United States, Catalonians who cherish the tradition came ardently to its defense.

``Unfortunately, there are intolerant people who are offended by any little thing," Josep Maria Joan, director of the Toy Museum of Catalonia, said Monday. His museum has a permanent collection of the figurines, known as caganers.

Spanish artist Antoni Miralda's exposition ``Poetical Gut" at Copia, a food, wine and arts museum in Napa, Calif., features ceramic figurines of the pope, nuns and angels with their pants down, squatting over their bowel movements.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a 350,000-member group based in New York, has written to the museum's board of trustees to say it finds the show offensive.

``When it's degrading, everybody knows it except the spin doctors who run the museums," the group's president, William Donohue, said Sunday. In a tradition that dates back to the 18th century, Catalonians hide caganers in Christmas Nativity scenes and invite friends over to try to find them. The figures symbolize fertilization and the hope for prosperity in the coming year, according to Joan.

``It's really only a game," he said. ``The caganer is not supposed to steal Jesus' spotlight in the manger scene. But it's logical that when traditions like this are exported they can be misunderstood."

An official with the Cultural Heritage department of the Barcelona Roman Catholic diocese, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the tradition as a harmless game for children and indicated the church has no plans to oppose it.

Although the traditional caganer resembles a red-capped Catalonian peasant, Miralda is not the first to depict public figures. Since the 1940s, Catalonians have been making modern renditions of the caganer - including, recently, Osama bin Laden.

For Marti Torrent, founder of the 70-member Association of Friends of the Caganer, the meaning goes deeper than child's play.

To him, the caganer's act symbolizes ``the fertilization of the earth" and pride in the land of Catalonia, whose inhabitants won the right to speak their own language and govern themselves after the 1939-75 Spanish dictatorship.

``I know that American society is more strict with its religious ideas than we are in Catalonia," said Torrent, 89, who added that what the caganer does is natural. ``Even the king has to do it every day or at least every other day."

Two Sides of the Sun, from the Guardian via forteana, "How the Sun (UK and Irish tabloid newspaper - jm) cast a two-faced shadow on the eurozone":

• UK: Dawn of a New Error: The euro is born. And thank goodness Britain is not part of it. ... Sun reporters in London were taken for a ride by the euro.

• Ireland: Dawn of a New Era: Ireland wakes up to a new era today as the euro is introduced. ... in Ireland, the new currency was set to be a huge hit with the public.

good interview with J.G. Ballard:

... consider another of his favourites: "There's this group that got into a disused American nuclear silo (site now gone, unfortunately - jm). It's wonderful! You're taken on a tour and you can choose alternatives. 'Would you like to look at the missile control room?', 'Would you like to see the sleeping quarters?'. It's straight out of the stuff that I was writing about all that time ago.

"Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the Bruce Willis films," he says. "I'm waiting for the first new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the Net and to the modern age. It'll come.''

My ghod, the new iMac is the coolest piece of industrial design I've seen in a while. Story here (via Boing Boing).

What used to be known as Media Grok before The Industry Standard fell over is now being published again, as Media Unspun. It'll be free from now until March, then it goes commercial. Here's hoping it works out.

Drunk men have been lurching into the headquarters of Queensland's Prostitution Licensing Authority and demanding prostitutes.

Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2002 11:49:35 -0800
From: (spam-protected) (glen mccready)
Forwarded-by: William Knowles (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
cc: (spam-protected)
Subject: 200 metres!

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/2002/01/04/FFXN6I063TC.html

BRISBANE, Jan 4 AAP|Published: Friday January 4, 6:02 PM

Drunk men have been lurching into the headquarters of Queensland's Prostitution Licensing Authority and demanding prostitutes.

The unwelcome men triggered a security overhaul of the authority, it was revealed today.

Police Minister Tony McGrady said "intoxicated or undesirable males" had regularly turned up at the Prostitution Licensing Authority's office looking for some action.

Some of the men wanted to hire a prostitute and others were looking for their partners, who they believed worked as prostitutes.

"Some of these males refused to leave the premises and caused minor disturbances," Mr McGrady said in response to a question on notice.

The incidents happened when the Prostitution Licensing Authority first moved into their offices in suburban Milton 18 months ago.

Mr McGrady confirmed the Milton offices had been upgraded before the Prostitution Licensing Authority moved in, on the advice of state government security experts.

The office had duress alarms, intercom facilities, a fireproof safe and was soundproofed.

Access to the offices through the roof was also sealed off.

The Prostitution Licensing Authority was set up in July 2000 to process the license applications for "boutique" brothels and monitor the legalised sex industry.

Queensland so far only has one legal brothel, operating in the inner-city Brisbane suburb of Bowen Hills.

The authority has approved a further three brothels, two in industrial areas of the Gold Coast and another in the southside Brisbane suburb of Yeerongpilly.

Last month, authority chairman Bill Carter said the he was also considering applications for brothels in Townsville, Mackay, the Sunshine and Gold Coasts and Brisbane.

Under state law, legal brothels must not have more than five rooms or employ more than five sex workers.

They must also be at least 200 metres from schools, churches, homes, hospitals and child-minding facilities.

By Barbara Adam

Again, from a nerdy POV. It's fascinating to discover this old SGI memo on memory leaks and code bloat, mainly because the code sizes they talk about are miniscule, these days.

The window system (Xsgi + 4Dwm) is up from 3.2 MB to 3.6 MB, and the miscellaneous stuff has grown as well.

3.6 Mb for a GUI desktop? Not bad! ;)

Much of the problem seems to be due to DSOs (jm: dynamic shared objects, aka shared libraries/DLLs) that load whole libraries instead of individual routines. Many SGI applications link with 20 or so large DSOs, virtually guaranteeing enormous executables.

As far as I know, this is still the case on most popular OSes.

Interestingly, I used both IRIX 4.0.x and 5.2 -- and I preferred 5.2. Could have been the hardware, though. But anyway -- the bottom line is, things have only gotten bigger and bloatier since then.

On a more nerdy tip, Joel talks about those days when you just can't get started, under the title "Fire and Motion". Here's a choice quote:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET - All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

...

The sales teams of the big companies understand cover fire. They go into their customers and say, OK, you don't have to buy from us. Buy from the best vendor. But make sure that you get a product that supports (XML / SOAP / CDE / J2EE) because otherwise you'll be Locked In The Trunk . Then when the little companies try to sell into that account, all they hear is obedient CTOs parrotting Do you have J2EE? And they have to waste all their time building in J2EE even if it doesn't really make any sales, and gives them no opportunity to distinguish themselves. It's a checkbox feature -- you do it because you need the checkbox saying you have it, but nobody will use it or needs it. And it's cover fire.

"Monster waves" -- ocean waves of 100 feet and more in height, not caused by seismic activity -- may be explained by a new theory from researchers at the Technical University in Berlin.

"Even in the tank the effect was awe-inspiring," said Prof Clauss. "The exploding wave was so powerful that it broke through the ceiling of the building in which the tank is located," he added.

Impressive -- but I'm pretty sure there's been eyewitness accounts of bigger waves than the ones mentioned (120 feet), as well. I wonder if the theory can account for those?

Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2002 12:38:53 -0800
From: Brian Chapman (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Mystery of monster waves solved

http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/01/06/wwave06.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/01/06/ixworld.html

Sunday Telegraph | 6 Jan 2002

Mystery of monster waves solved By Tony Paterson in Berlin

GERMAN scientists claim to have explained the mystery behind so-called monster waves - the term given by oceanographers for near-vertical breaking seas up to 120ft high. Such seas are thought to have sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships without trace during the past two decades.

Often dismissed as sailors' yarns, monster waves have terrified seafarers for centuries and provided the raw material for countless novels and films including Sebastian Junger's recent best-seller The Perfect Storm.

Yet until now scientists and oceanographers had been unable to determine exactly what formed such gigantic "one-off" seas that are capable of breaking a 600ft-long ship in half and sending it to the bottom within seconds.

A team of oceanographers at the Technical University in Berlin has now managed to explain the phenomenon with the aid of computers and by simulating monster waves in a tank.

"Our wave experiments have proved for the first time that monster waves are physically possible and that they really do exist," said Prof Gunther Clauss, who led the team of scientists.

"This represents a breakthrough for the shipping and oil industries because we can now start to design structures that can cope with these monsters," he added.

Using a computerised, hydraulically powered wave-making machine in a specially designed tank supplied by oceanographers at Hanover University, Prof Clauss's team has established that monster waves can occur with little or no warning.

The waves are created in a storm when slow-moving waves are caught up by a succession of faster waves travelling at more than twice their speed. "What happens then is that the waves simply pile up on top of each other to create a monster," said Prof Clauss.

"The result is an almost vertical wall of water which towers up to 120ft in height before collapsing on itself. Any vessel caught by one of these has little chance of surviving."

Photographs of the experiments show the monster wave building into a vertical wall of water before exploding into an uncontrollable boiling mass as it collapses on itself.

"Even in the tank the effect was awe-inspiring," said Prof Clauss. "The exploding wave was so powerful that it broke through the ceiling of the building in which the tank is located," he added.

Monster waves are thought to have caused the loss of at least 200 "super carriers" or ships measuring more than 600ft in length on the world's oceans over the past 20 years. The unexplained disappearance of many smaller vessels including trawlers and yachts could put the total number of losses much higher.

Yet accounts by seamen who have witnessed such waves are comparatively rare. One, dating from 1995, was when the QE2 was hit by a hurricane on a crossing to New York.

She survived what was estimated to be a 95ft high wave which the ship took directly over her bow. Her captain, Ronald Warwick, described the phenomenon as "like going into the White Cliffs of Dover".

One of the few small-boat sailors to survive a monster wave was the British yachtsman, Brigadier Miles Smeeton, who did so twice. His 50ft ketch, Tzu Hang was dismasted twice by such waves while attempting to round Cape Horn in the 1950s - once after being "pitchpoled", toppled stern over bow.

In Germany, the horrors of monster waves have been brought right up to date after revelations about the near-sinking of the German Antarctic cruise liner Bremen in the south Atlantic last year. The ship with 137 passengers aboard was hit by a 114ft wave in March while heading towards make Rio de Janiero after an Antarctic cruise.

The impact smashed windows on the bridge and cut the ship's electricity supply. The vessel drifted engineless for more than half an hour heeling at an angle of 40 degrees in huge seas whipped by hurricane-strength winds.

"I have been at sea for 48 years, but never have I experienced such a wave," said the Bremen's captain, Heinz Aye, 65, who is now retired.

Prof Clauss said that his team's research would help naval architects in their efforts to construct ships and oil platforms that were capable of withstanding such freak wave forces.

"In many cases it is as simple as building a bridge on a ship that is not slab-sided but rounded, so it can cope with being hit by a monster wave. Most ships plying the oceans right now are not built along these lines," he said.

The team also hopes that its research will help in the development of radar that is specifically designed to warn of sea conditions that could produce the monster-wave phenomenon.

"This could help the captains of ships to steer clear of a danger area, but the truth is we can do nothing to prevent monster waves. They are a product of nature," Prof Clauss added.

Mmmmm..... Marmite. "It must be spread thinly. T-h-i-n-l-y..."

We now, thanks to various visitors from the other side of the world, have 4 large jars of the stuff. Looks like we'll be lugging it around for a while. yum.

Ever wonder if computer industry analysts were, quite simply, for sale to the highest bidder? Wonder no more, courtesy of the latest MS leak via the Register:

1. The first wave will attack the perception that Linux is free. To that effect, we'll have an independent analysis commissioned by DH Brown ... The DH Brown report will be customer ready and will help your customer understand just how competitive Microsoft is in this arena.

2. The second wave will be a full blown cost analysis comparison case study between Linux and Windows in a variety of usage scenarios (web, file and print, etc.) done independently by the analysts for us. ETA for this tool is in May and it will be a great tool to help you sell the value of Windows solutions over Linux. ...

(emphases on will added by jm.)

It's alleged that 10 midwives at Wollongong Hospital's maternity ward have been holding nitrous oxide and tamazepam parties at work. Those nurses have all the fun!

Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 09:14:22 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Umm . . .

----- (from The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 31.12.01)

http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,3512875%255E3163,00.html

Midwives 'partied' as babies were born

By ANNA COCK

31dec01

TEN midwiveshave been stood down or shifted from Wollongong Hospital's maternity ward over allegations they have been holding laughing gas drug parties at work.

The Illawarra Area Health Service has launchedan investigation into illegal drug use among midwives, and one doctor, who are alleged to have been inhaling nitrous oxide -- known as laughing gas -- and swallowing sleeping tablets while on duty.

The Daily Telegraph has been told the drugs were taken during frequent parties at the hospital, held inside empty birthing rooms while babies were being delivered next door.

A junior nurse brought the practice to the attentionof hospital authorities on December 11, claiming that one of the parties was held inside a birthing room on December 9.

While two women were in labour with premature babies, three of the four midwives on duty were partying with nitrous oxide, an anaesthetic gas which promotes feelings of euphoria and can cause hallucinations.

The junior staff member is said to have been horrified by the behaviour, which had the potential to put patients at serious risk -- particularly during birth complications.

Authorities investigating the drug parties arebelieved to have been handed a photograph of one of the events, held during July.

It is believed some senior maternity ward staff have been implicated.

Since the investigation began last month, those who are not facing the accusations have been subjected to bullying from the alleged ring leaders, urging them not to co-operate.

A caution was issued to all maternity ward staff against harassment and intimidation – and one staff member who flouted the order was stood down on December 19.

Two days later, on December 21, that nurse and five of her colleagues were stood down and four were moved to other areas of the hospital.

Investigators examining the hospital's drug records are understood to have uncovered unusually high usage of nitrous oxide and temazapam in the maternity ward.

This supports their belief that the parties have been something of a tradition at the hospital, rather than a one-off incident.

Yesterday, Illawarra Area Health Service chief executive Dr Tony Sherbon confirmed that an investigation into "unprofessional conduct" at Wollongong Hospital's birthing unit had led to disciplinary action.

"The Illawarra Area Health Service executive and Wollongong Hospital managers are deeply concerned about this serious breach of conduct," Dr Sherbon said.

"The decision to stand down midwives was made on December 21 following allegations they had misused nitrous oxide while on duty.

"There are also concerns about the high use of the sedative temazapam in the birthing unit and that investigation is still ongoing," he said.

Dr Sherbon said the NSW Nursing Association and Nurses Registration Board had been advised of the decision to stand down the midwives.

And "a thorough review of all recent births at Wollongong Hospital has not shown any link between the use of nitrous oxide and any adverse outcomes for any mothers or babies''.

Incompetent websites, part 43985943. Waider @ ILUG notes:

It's a moot point at this stage, but am I the only person (well, other than whoever fixed the problem) who noticed that the euro countdown on http://www.euro.ie/ was, until some time this morning, counting down to midnight Dec 30/31 as opposed to midnight Dec 31/Jan 1?

snicker!

Where does the smell of rain originate from?

If you've wondered why the ground, or the road smells a bit odd when it rains after a long dry spell, wonder no more... The smell is given off by Streptomyces bacteria, a genus belonging to the Actinomycetales order of Gram-positive eubacteria, also called actinomycetes.

The bacteria grow in damp, warm earth before fine weather dries out the soil, which then blows around as dust. During a dry spell, actinomycetes produce spores that are released on contact with moisture. Rain hitting the ground kicks up an aerosol of water and soil and you breathe in fine particles of soil containing the bacteria.

Cool! via yak.net.

Jeff Bone points out Lingua::Romana::Perligata, a Perl module ... that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl.

Sample:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
fac sic
nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
cis.

The mind boggles.

Blade director Steven Norrington is planning to direct a movie of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore's fantastic comic. This should be bizarre -- Victorian superheroes, in authentic period style, filmed by a hyper-Hollywood director (going by Blade at least).

I wonder if they'll take out all the accurate 19th-century colonialist bigotry: "the inscrutable Chinee" etc.?

BTW -- went to see Lord of the Rings last night, totally fantastic. The interpretation was spot on too, and some of the CGI effects (Saruman's tower!) were just incredible! Well happy with that -- best movie of the year by far. And the "over-celtic" criticism noted before just doesn't stand up IMO.

Only fault I could have is the slightly sluggish first bit (but I suppose LoTR novices need a bit of explanation), and (as Lukage pointed out via private mail) the "breakdancing Gandalf" sequence. Well, also, the elves were a bit super-fey but I guess that's unavoidable.