gregladen | December 6, 2008Twenty eight years ago, Martha entered a persistent vegetative state. Her husband, Klaus, was acquitted of her murder twice. Have you seen the movie "Reversal of Fortune"? That's the story.
US heiress Martha von Bulow, who spent almost three decades in a coma but was still at the centre of 1980s courtroom dramas, has died at the age of 76.
Mrs von Bulow, known as Sunny, was found unconscious in her Rhode Island mansion in December 1980.
Her second husband, Claus von Bulow, who is now a society figure in Britain, was acquitted of twice trying to kill her with insulin injections.
bbc
And…
gregladen | December 6, 2008The much-anticipated next incarnation of the popular Python programming language -- voted favorite scripting language in the 2008 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards -- slithered onto the scene on Wednesday with the release of Python 3.0. Known popularly as Python 3000 or Py3k, Python 3.0 bears the distinction of being the first release in the language's history to deliberately break compatibility with previous versions.
The Python 3.0 change everyone is talking about is without a doubt the break with backwards-compatibility.... details
Everything I've heard about 3.0 makes me think this…
gregladen | December 6, 2008With her pants down, squatting over the pile of fertilizer she has created. Below the fold. Don't go there unless you are prepared to be shocked and amazed.
------------------ the fold ------------------------
Well, OK, so maybe this is not as shocking as you were expecting.
This is one of several (click here to see them all) examples at the Sun Sentinel of Caganers, a Catalonian Spanish tradition dating to the 17th century. These squatting, defecating figurines are to be placed with nativity scenes. Then, people coming over to visit you are challenged to find the squatting, pooping,…
gregladen | December 6, 2008
Carnival of Cinema: A Smorgasbord!
The Totally Hot December Scientiae
79th Carnival Of The Liberals: Kicking Around George W. Bush & Evolution
Skeptics' Circle 101: The African Edition
Carnival of Trashy Romance Novels - Because Books Don't Fall Asleep Afterward
Cancer Research Blog Carnival #16
Carnival of the Liberals #79
Carnival of Socialism 24
Log Buffer #126: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs (databases)
gregladen | December 6, 2008I have only the vaguest memories of this myself, and that must be second hand. On December 6th 1989, I was probably in the jungle not getting much news. Anyway, Sciencewoman reminds us:
On December 6, 1989, an armed gunman named Marc Lepine entered an engineering classroom at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. He demanded all 48 men in the class leave the room, lined up all 9 women against a wall...
Read the whole thing here, please.
gregladen | December 6, 2008I have a little more information and some exact numbers for you.
First, some of the numbers.
The number of votes per candidate not counting Minneapolis 3-1, which has a packet of missing votes currently being searched for:
Franken: 1,210,285
Coleman: 1,210,995
The number of votes per candidate including Minneapolis 31's results from the machine count:
Franken: 1,211,375
Coleman: 1,211,590
Regardless of anything you've heard or read, this second set of numbers is exactly how this recount started ... with Franken behind by 215 votes.
Then we have the number of votes per candidate after the…
gregladen | December 6, 2008Individual animals that live and and forage in groups may not always benefit from a particular move (to or from a foraging site) in the same way as other individuals in the group. Therefore, there must be some kind of negotiation among the critters. Theoretical work almost always seem to show that consensus based group decisions will prevail because this minimizes individual costs. The altnernative, despotic decision (where a dominant individual decides where the group goes) should rarely happen. But the theory is apparently weak because despotic decision making seems to occur in nature.…
gregladen | December 5, 2008LHC to restart in 2009
Geneva, 5 December 2008. CERN today confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will restart in 2009. This news forms part of an updated report, published today, on the status of the LHC following a malfunction on 19 September.
"The top priority for CERN today is to provide collision data for the experiments as soon as reasonably possible," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "This will be in the summer of 2009."
The initial malfunction was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. This resulted in mechanical damage and…
gregladen | December 5, 2008The RSPB (BirdLife in the UK) and other partners have launched a last push to find one of the world's rarest birds.
They have issued a call to search for and find any remaining populations of Slender-billed Curlew Numenius tenuirostris. This announcement was made at the Ninth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species (UNEP-CMS COP 9), in Rome, Italy, 1-5 December.
Classified as Critically Endangered, Slender-billed Curlew is the rarest species found in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, with no confirmed records since 1999
More here.
gregladen | December 5, 2008Allen's Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann's Rule and Cope's Rule. It is all about body size. Cope's Rule ... which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute ... says that over time the species in a given lineage tend to be larger and larger. Bergmann's Rule says that mammals get larger in colder environments. Allen's Rule has mammals getting rounder in colder climates, by decreasing length of appendages such as limbs, tails and ears.
All three rules seem to be exemplified in human evolution. Modern humans tend to be larger and rounder in cooler…
gregladen | December 5, 2008IBM launches first Linux-OpenOffice desktop with virtualization features ...
IBM has added a Linux desktop with new virtualization capabilities to its portfolio.
The Virtual Desktop, which bundles Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, Virtual Bridges' KVM-based desktop virtualization software and IBM's Open Collaboration Client Solution, is available now, Big Blue announced on Thursday.
None of the pieces are new. But the bundled solution makes it easier and cheaper for companies to deploy a complete VDI solution on Linux, IBM maintains. IBM's OCCS includes Lotus Symphony, its implementation of the ODF…
gregladen | December 5, 2008All but one precinct has been counted (and I understand that will be done momentarily). However, there is a box (or bag or envelope) of ballots missing in Minneapolis. The Secretary of State has indicated that the recount deadline is extended to allow these missing 130 or so votes to be found and included. (Coleman's lawyer is objecting to this, naturally.) In a television interview earlier today, Richie also indicated that the state will be looking at a number of absentee ballots as well.
The current difference between Coleman and Franken is probably about 192 votes, with Coleman ahead…
gregladen | December 5, 2008Getting sentenced is a drag. One time, when I got sentenced, a conjuncture of highly unlikely events occurred that made the whole thing rather more scary, and more of a circus, than usual.
My sentence was unfair, of course, as I was innocent. I was convicted on the strength of planted evidence. The fact that my arrest involved a high speed chase and that I was arrested along with a convicted felon didn't help either. But that's another story, for another time.
But nonetheless, I ended up standing in front of the judge in the courtroom listening to a sentence of probation. Routine, no…
gregladen | December 5, 2008
This tiger was owned by a large cat breeder and handler who provides tigers, lions, and some other beasts for the entertainment industry. Notice the white spots on the tiger's ears. I spent a fair amount of time with this tiger, in its enclosure, photographing it as various other things were going on. As I was the stranger in the room, and since I kept moving, the tiger kept a close eye on me, but not with its actual eyes. I took about a hundred photographs of this animal, and in every single one there are two white spots ... those spots on the ears ... looking at me.
It is said that the…
gregladen | December 5, 2008
Sometimes called the Mountains of the Moon. The Rwenzori is really one giant mountain with several peaks. Since it is not formed through the usual process of tectonic folding, it is not really like other mountain "ranges." It appears to have been pushed up in the middle of the Western Rift Valley. Lots of bits of the earth get pushed up like this, but the Rwenzori may be the biggest such event contributing to the current landscape of the earth.
The Rwenzori is usually shrouded in cloud, and many people have spent many years in this area without seeing them. This photograph is…
gregladen | December 4, 2008and unmounting. In Linux.
Here's the problem. With upgrades to Linux Kernel 2.6 for autoplugging devices, and hotswapping of USB devices, etc., mounting has become more complex. At the same time, the spread of Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions among the wider unwashed masses has lead to the stupification (or perhaps I should say the degeekification) of the Linux User Space.
As a result, things like:
/sbin/mount -o nosuid\,nodev /dev/cd0a /CDROM
just don't cut it anymore.
What you really want is a graphical user interface with dancing hard drives and icons for USB ports and such…
gregladen | December 4, 2008
At the top of the gorge, a small stream just before it plunges about 60 meters into the gorge.