Archived Blog
For those geeks of you out there, here’s something that’s sure to appeal to you:
An online partially visual version of the old hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy game (which if you’ve ever played the old text only version (which I think may be available at Home of the Underdogs), you will know to be spectacularly, amusingly frustrating. In fact I don’t think the adjective frustrating really adequately does justice to how entertainingly infuriating it can be at points. Anyway)
This is a little Youtube video of a demo of a frankly awesome new little software tool developed by microsoft. Words can’t really do it justice. It’s REALLY cool.
As a little science aside, apparently Dolphins from different areas have different “accents”, which is to say that their vocabulary of clicks and squeaks vary from group to group.
A british minerologist has discovered Kryptonite in a Serbian mine…
Today slashdot mentioned the ending of an internet show which I had never heard of, but which apparently included the handing out missions to it’s viewers, and one of these had been to make an earth sandwich.
Think of it. Placing one piece of bread in one spot on the ground, and then placing (or coordinating with other people to place) another piece of bread on the exact opposite side of the world, thus creating an earth sandwich. I just love the imagery..
Well, I’m officially into the study for the surgical part 1 exam, and I’ve been reading all about neuroanatomy, and it makes my brain hurt.
I find myself looking forward to going to work, so I can give my brain a rest, and try and loose the feeling that there is someone standing beside me as I study slowly packing more and more cotton wool through my ears into my skull.
That said I am beginning to wonder why they weren’t more insistent that we learn this more thoroughly when we were in med school. I still feel that there’s not much point in forcing everyone to learn detailed anatomy if they’re not going to use it (similar to making everyone learn biochemical pathways they’ll never use again), but the chapter I am currently reading would have been a good thing to examine, because it lays the groundwork of general principles and basic details that everyone would probably benefit from.
I keep on having “Oh, right, that makes senseâ€, and “Riiight, so that’s how that works†moments, and I can only assume that I will end this year an awful lot more knowledgeable than when I started, having finally been forced to read all the text books that I was too slack to read properly while I was at med school (it also presumably helps that I have a better practical contextual framework to place the knowledge in now than I did then).
Arguments against digital rights management (DRM) systems frequently claim that they inconvenience legitimate customers, while not offering the media owners any real protection because those who want to get around the protection will do so (usually sooner rather than later).
To reinforce this point there have been 2 interesting pieces of news recently.
Firstly someone has shown a way to bypass the content protection on both of the next generation DVD formats (HD-DVD and Blueray). These had been touted as being highly secure so that people could not backup/copy/use in an “unaurthorised manned” the movies they contained, but for all their efforts they are back to where they started, having secured nothing, and inconvenienced legitimate customers (there are frequent reports of people not being able to play HD movies they had legitimately bought, because the DVD’s DRM didn’t consider their hardware setup sufficiently secure).
Next is a report that almost as soon as it had been released, someone has managed to bypass the much vaunted “Protected Media Path” (PMP) within Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. As I understand it, PMP is supposed to stop other programs from listening in on and recording audio and video content between the processor and the speakers or the screen, thus eliminating another way that popular software commonly copies digital media. There are no specific details at the moment of exactly how this hack works, but you can bet that it will either be released shortly, or someone else will take up the challenge and release their method. Between this, several other reported hacks, and a number of viruses already spreading that effect Vista, Microsoft’s “Most secure OS ever” is starting to look not that secure after all.
Slate has an interesting piece on buying music from iTunes stores other than the one for your specific country.
It uses the example of Japanese songs that you can’t buy through iTunes America, but can buy through itunes Japan (if you live in Japan), mainly it seems because the author has a slightly unhealthy fascination with obscure Japanese pop and rock bands, but that’s neither here nor there.
It ponders why the music companies cannot come up with some arrangement so that you can buy music from overseas iTunes stores (after all, a sale is revenue for them, and denying it decreases their profit and promotes file sharing to get music), and also has some interesting comments on the various ways people routinely work around these restrictions, which is something I hadn’t read about before (apparently you can easily buy legit prepaid iTunes cards for other countries on popular auction websites, and then just buy songs using those).
Interesting read anyway.
I stumbled upon a number of cool sciency stories this afternoon, and thought I’d package them together to pass them along.
The first relates to New Zealand and the long held belief that New Zealand had never been home to a native land based mammal, until they were introduced first by the polynesians (who bought rats and dogs) and the europeans (who bought just about everything else). There were bats, and seals, but nothing land based. Now fossils have been found which suggest that NZ was once home to a small native mouse sized mammal, which lived about 16 million years ago – Better get your history and biology books out kids and cross out that particular paragraph…
Secondly, earlier this week a telescope in New Mexico caught some damn cool footage of a shock wave spreading out across the surface of the sun. The technical name for the phenomenon is a Moreton wave, however for popular consumption the press releases all referred to it as a solar tsunami. Either way the picture is pretty cool.
Next was an article on slashdot relating to some research on how smell worked. The traditionally proposed model for how it worked was one smell molecule fits one receptor. The new research however was proposing that the receptors worked through some system of quantum electron tunneling, so that it was the nature of the quantum interaction that triggered the receptor (and thus the sensation of the smell) and not the shape of the molecule (thus explaining the previous observation that differently shaped molecules can have the same smell).
I was just reading about a team of scientists who had created a custom biological catalyst system for splitting water to produce hydrogen.
You can read the abstract here (Warning! Science content).
This is also quite interesting given that it comes only a day after I stumbled onto a website that deals with amateur genetic engineering, which I have found myself thinking about quietly ever since. (The idea first entered my consciousness a few years ago after I read a few fictional short stories that were published in the scientific journal Nature, one dealing with a kid who uses a college fund to order DNA sequencing and synthesis services over the internet to recreate extinct species, and another dealing with a group of biotech neo-punks who like genetically modifying themselves at home so that they can do things like grow beards of feathers and the like). I keep on thinking that it would be cool to get back into some degree of biochem research, and the notion of directed protein evolution to create custom enzymes keeps quietly exciting me, but that’s perhaps another story for another time.
